A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man and child at Vienna's Natural History Museum. (Credit: Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia Commons
Being a lifelong surfer or diver sometimes comes with an odd side-effect: the growth of small, bony knobs in the ear canals, the result of chronic exposure to cold water and air.
They're often referred to as "surfer's ear" because the condition is common among those who ride the waves. But there might well be a more apt term for the condition, based on new finding ...read more
Graphite, an allotrope of carbon. (Credit: Miriam Doerr Martin Frommherz/Shutterstock)
Carbon is, all things considered, pretty great. Its position on the periodic table of elements — which symbolizes the amount of spare electrons it has, more or less — allows it to form an incredible variety of molecules. This includes allotropes, the different forms an element can take on its own based on its structure. Diamond, coal and graphene are all just varieties of carbon.
But that&rs ...read more
A fecal transplant capsule from OpenBiome. (Credit: Erik Jacobs)
Mark Smith dares you to come up with a fecal joke he hasn’t heard. It’s not your typical industry parlance, but when you’re in the business of transplanting the stuff, it helps to have a sense of humor about it. “I think we’ve gone through just about every poop pun under the sun,” says Smith, who makes a living reallocating the contents of people’s bowels.
He’s the co-founder a ...read more
Much of our genome has no apparent purpose. Is it so-called "junk DNA" or do we simply not understand it? (Credit: ktsdesign/Shutterstock)
Would
you purchase a book with over 98 percent of the text written in gibberish?
Biology has no business in the book industry, yet it still writes a pretty
fascinating guidebook: DNA. Our genetic manual holds the instructions for the proteins
that make up and power our bodies. But less than 2 percent of our DNA actually
codes for them.
The
rest — ...read more
Hemlock trees killed by hemlock woolly adelgid in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina. (Courtesy Songlin Fei)
With its sparkling green wings, the emerald ash borer, a tiny beetle no longer than a knuckle-length, is almost beautiful. The insect however has been ravaging America’s forests for nearly 20 years. First seen in Michigan in the early 2000s, the invasive pest has killed millions of ash trees in more than 30 states.
The ash borer is not the only species d ...read more
In this artist illustration, the sun (the yellow star at center) moves through a clump of interstellar gas that may still be raining down radioactive iron from a long-ago supernova explosion. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/Adler/U. Chicago/Wesleyan)
Antarctica is one of the most pristine places on the planet. Thanks to its generally inhospitable nature, as well as its natural isolation, it’s a good place for astronomers to search for meteorites and other materials that fall from the sky. They te ...read more
10 Shaft in the Superior-Resolution copper prospect in Arizona. Resolution Copper.
Copper is one of the most valuable metals on the planet. Sure, it lacks the cachet of gold, silver, platinum -- no, those are "precious metals". Yet, without copper, the world as we know it would not operate. If you have electricity, you need copper.
This week, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, one of the world's largest mining companies, were given permission from the US Forest Service to move ahead with the Res ...read more
Lightning was detected in association with a thunderstorm located over the Arctic Ocean on Saturday, Aug. 11. (Source: National Weather Service)
We're accustomed to lightning crackling within thunderstorms over relatively warm places like Florida — which happens to be the U.S. lightning champ.
But lightning near the North Pole? Well, that's what happened on Saturday. And so now we get to add this to the list of extreme events that have befallen the Arctic this summer.
These incl ...read more
