The Great Lakes were a massive graveyard for ships lost at sea for centuries. Sailboats have slipped into storms, never to be seen again. Steamers have rocked in the waves. Even massive freighters have sunk to the sea floor.Although shipwrecks may seem like part of the Great Lakes’ past, advancing technology is helping researchers understand the weather patterns that have made so many voyages fatal. Technology is also helping scientists find sunken vessels that were once thought to be lost for ...read more

To the untrained eye, cicadas may look extremely similar to each other, characterized by their hard exoskeleton and distinctive drone.  But, as millions of residents of the southeastern and midwestern United States will soon discover in the spring of 2024, the different species of cicadas can vary widely in everything from their sound to their appearance to their behavior. Two broods of cicadas — Broods XIX and XIII — are expected to emerge from the ground, culminating their life cycle by ...read more

Spring is go time for climbers who hope to summit Mount Everest, Earth’s highest peak above sea level. Hundreds of mountaineers from around the world travel to Asia in April and May, headed for base camps in Nepal and Tibet.But jagged peaks won’t be the only thing they see. Especially on Everest’s more heavily traversed Nepal side, they’ll find fields of garbage – including cans, bottles, plastic and human and animal excrement.Each year, more than 60,000 trekkers and climbers visit the ...read more

In the seven decades since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, humankind has sent a whole lot of material over the Kármán line. Not all of it came back.Like spacefaring litterbugs, we’ve scattered refuse far and wide across the cosmos. Our probes and their contents sail out of the solar system on one-way rides, or take up permanent residence in the orbit of distant planets. Miscellaneous items get dropped during spacewalks, released as symbolic gestures, or deliberately dumped for logistica ...read more

Imagine you’re a police officer. You spot a car that’s swerving all over the road. You pull the driver over and they’re clearly intoxicated. With slurred speech, they swear that they haven’t had a drop of alcohol all day. Would you believe them?In 2024, a Belgian man was acquitted after he was cited three times for DUI within four years. Though his job at a brewery likely raised suspicions, he insisted that he hadn’t been drinking. Three doctors confirmed that he suffered from a condit ...read more

Scientists recently reconstructed a Neanderthal skull that was both flattened like a pancake and shattered into pieces. The team then also used digital technology to create a 3-D approximation of the 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal’s face. The archeologists suspect the woman’s head had been crushed — possibly by rockfall — after her death. Then layers of sediment deposited over thousands of years compacted it. The skull was about an inch thick when the archeologists found it. Reconstr ...read more

Buzzwords describing the digital dating scene are all over social media. Have you been ghosted? Is someone orbiting you? Are you being breadcrumbed? While these dating patterns may not be new, the words to describe them continue to evolve.As a psychotherapist, I see firsthand the impact these experiences can have on mental health. Given the sheer number of people using dating apps – 53% of American 18-to-29-year-olds and 37% of 30-to-49-year-olds– it’s likely you have some first- or second ...read more

If all goes well late on May 6, 2024, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will blast off into space on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Launching from the Kennedy Space Center, this last crucial test for Starliner will test out the new spacecraft and take the pair to the International Space Station for about a week.Part of NASA’s commercial crew program, this long-delayed mission will represent the vehicle’s first crewed launch. If successful, it will give NASA – and in the fut ...read more

A bit of medical advice: Stay away from medieval squirrels. That’s what a study in Current Biology seems to suggest, anyway, after showing that red squirrels hosted strains of the leprosy bacteria Mycobacterium leprae in England’s Middle Ages.“In the wake of COVID-19, animal hosts are now becoming a focus of attention for understanding disease appearance and persistence,” Inskip said in a statement. “Our research shows that there is a long history of zoonotic diseases, and they have ha ...read more

The average human body expends a rough equivalent to 800 AA batteries of energy per day. But the body’s mechanical efficiency is only estimated at around 15 to 30 percent, meaning most of the energy we gain from food is released as heat.At the same time, humans are increasingly in need of a safe, reliable source of power for the growing arsenal of implantable devices that researchers are developing to improve and save lives. At present, cardiac pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, neurostim ...read more