(Credit: Choksawatdikorn/Shutterstock) Some of the smallest creatures in the sea are also some of the most influential. Plankton, a group of microscopic marine organisms that includes bacteria, amoebas and snail larvae, among other things, prop up the base of the oceanic food chain. Every sea creature, from clownfish to whales, ultimately depend on plankton for food. Now, a new study that peers into a past before human influence shows climate change has upset the distribution of plankton ...read more

The power and propulsion system for the Lunar Gateway will be built by Maxar. Courtesy of Business Wire) In a talk at the Florida Institute of Technology on Thursday, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that Maxar Technologies will build the first stage of NASA’s planned Lunar Gateway. The Gateway, part of NASA's larger Artemis program to return to the moon, is meant to be a waystation of sorts placed in a long orbit around the moon. It will provide a habitat for astronaut ...read more

The telescope, once complete, will be made of hundreds of spherical detectors suspended at the bottom of the sea. (Credit: KM3NeT) Deep under the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of watchful eyes hang suspended on cables, waiting for a rare and valuable flash. Their quarry are ghostly neutrino particles, capable of tunneling through light-years of space and a planet's worth of rock without ever coming into contact with matter. But, here, under the ocean, they just might hit a detector from the ...read more

In the final minutes of Apollo 11’s descent to the lunar surface, five 1201 and 1202 alarms blared in the lunar module. The computer was overloaded with data, and for a brief moment it looked like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t land on the Moon. As we know, they did; Apollo 11 got a GO to land in spite of the alarms. What we don’t know is the man whose work allowed the crew reboot the computer and save the landing: Hal Laning.  https://youtu.be/LELUXyVDOKk ...read more

Researchers say women are worse at math and word-based tasks at cooler room temperatures. (Credit: ESB Professional/Shutterstock) “The women’s winter is here. The freeze is upon us,” warns a Game of Thrones parody about men and women's office temperature preferences. If you have a Y chromosome, you probably haven’t experienced “women’s winter.” As the video explains, women’s winter is “when spring turns to summer and there’s bloss ...read more

(Credit: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock) Bipolar patients are seven times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, according to a new study. Though the news may be disheartening to those suffering from the already-trying condition, the link might also lead to clues about the causes behind the two conditions. Parkinson’s is a complex disease associated with a gradual decline in dopamine levels produced by neurons, or brain cells. It eventually leads to impaired movements and ot ...read more

(Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock) Public interest in the science of powerful psychoactive drugs is at an-all-time, er, high. Evidence for the therapeutic benefits of marijuana, MDMA, psilocybin and more is growing, based on a resurgence of scientific interest in studying these compounds. But many of these drugs are strictly banned by the federal government, and those caught with them on the street can face steep fine and felony prison time. So where are researchers getting the drugs fo ...read more

One of the meteorites that fell at Aguas Zarcas struck a doghouse's roof. (Photo courtesy of Michael Farmer) A rare meteorite fall in Costa Rica has astronomers racing to get their hands on samples. Meteorites are an astronomer’s dream. In a field that by definition studies objects and phenomena above and beyond Earth’s atmosphere, many researchers never get a chance to touch or see up close the things they study. But then, sometimes, these items simply rain down from the sky, ...read more

The fungus among us is a key player in the ecosystem — and was part of the world hundreds of millions of years before we were. Hold on, make that potentially a billion years before we came along. Fungi microfossils from the Canadian Arctic are 900 million-1 billion years old, pushing back the fossil record for these organisms by at least 450 million years. This discovery is about more than the very distant evolutionary kin of mushrooms, however. The microfossils include the ...read more

A tiger shark — woodpeckers beware. (Credit: Shane Gross/Shutterstock) Often called “the garbage cans of the sea,” tiger sharks are voracious eaters. The sharks will eat just about anything — fish, other sharks, seabirds, sea turtles, whale carcasses. The list goes on.  That hodgepodge of prey now also includes a few creatures that don't usually even go in the ocean. Young tiger sharks also feast on sparrows, woodpeckers and other land-based birds, says a group ...read more