This is a perfect week to make and share your pollinator observations with scientists. Our editors selected five projects in need of your help.
More about pollinators from Penn State's website:"Pollinators are animals (primarily insect, but sometimes avian or mammalian) that fertilize plants, resulting in the formation of seeds and the fruit surrounding seeds. Humans and other animals rely on pollinators to produce nuts and fruits that are essential components of a healthy diet."
So, ...read more
In the mid-1960s, an English archaeologist discovered an enormous and ancient settlement called Çatalhöyük on the Konya Plain in south central Turkey. Wall paintings and figurines of humans and animals revealed a cultured community once lived there around 9000 years ago. Crowded houses and numerous graves revealed a growing and complex society.
Researchers established the Çatalhöyük Research Project in the early 1990s to continue investigating what's thought ...read more
An artist rendered their own view of what the merging galaxies might look like. (Credit: NAOJ)
Thirteen billion years ago, two galaxies collided to make something totally new. Each of those galaxies was among the universe’s first, since the cosmic clock had only been ticking for less than a billion years. As the galaxies’ dust and gas swirled together, new generations of stars were born, and their light began racing across the cosmos until it collided with the 66 radio telescopes ...read more
(Credit: SpeedKingz/Shutterstock)
The
first time someone synthesized saccharin, the artificial sweetener in Sweet’N
Low, it was an accident. A scientist studying coal tar in 1879 didn’t wash his
hands before eating dinner and was surprised to taste a sweet residue from the
lab on his fingertips. Same goes for the invention of the sweetener sodium
cyclamate in 1937: the unwitting pioneer, who was working on a fever medication,
put his cigarette down on the lab bench, and when he pi ...read more
Colorized elevation map of a lakebed in New Jersey shows stripes of ancient sediment deposits. The deposits are tied to cycles of wet and dry climates throughout Earth’s history. (Credit: LIDAR image, US Geological Survey; digital colorization by Paul Olsen)
Ribbons of blue — the modern Raritan and Neshanic rivers — slice across a landscape that’s key to understanding Earth’s deep-time climate cycles. This colorized elevation map captures a 40-square-mile chunk o ...read more
Overall, the global mean temperature during March through May was 1.02 °C warmer than the 1951-1980 average. This made it the second warmest such period in records dating back to 1880. (Source: NASA GISS)
March through May — spring in the Northern Hemisphere — was the second warmest such period in records dating back to 1880, according to a new analysis out today from NASA.
On its own, the month of May was third warmest.
The map above shows how temperatures around the ...read more
These clouds snapped by the Curiosity rover on Mars are much lower and thicker than the meteor-generated clouds the study looked at. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Justin Cowart)
No matter what planet you’re on, physics remains the same. For clouds, that means they follow a peculiar law – they form only around a seed of some sort, usually a fleck of dust or salt. On Earth, with its thick atmosphere and strong air currents, it’s possible to find these lightweight particles through ...read more
Moonrise over the Wasatch Mountains. NASA.
This summer is really the summer of the Moon. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, many people are thinking about our past and future relationship with our celestial partner. It is the only object in space whose surface can be seen with the naked eye (without going blind ... sorry Sun), yet only two dozen people have even been there. As we look back at our first visit five decades ago, it's worth taking a moment to consider ...read more
A short history of the universe since the time of the Big Bang. We can directly observe more than 13 billion years of change, but the beginning itself is an enduring mystery. (Credit: ESA)
The Big Bang is the defining narrative of modern cosmology: a bold declaration that our universe had a beginning and has a finite age, just like the humans who live within it. That finite age, in turn, is defined by the evidence that universe is expanding (again, and unfortunately, many of us are familiar ...read more
A mockup of the Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated Apollo's way to the Moon. MIT Library.
Driving, say, to a friend’s house, we usually have directions to follow like “turn left at the light then it’s the third door on the right.” The same isn’t true when going to the Moon; there are no signposts guiding the way. So how exactly did Apollo astronauts know where they were going when they went to the Moon?
This one is tough. You can’t just lau ...read more
