Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers produces a report card for the nation’s infrastructure that assigns grades based on the condition of structures like roads, bridges, and dams, and the investments that they need. Heavy rainfall generated widespread flooding. in the Upper Midwest in late June 2024, putting at least one aging dam at risk. In southern Minnesota, the Blue Earth River cut a path around the Rapidan Damin Rapidan Township, about 15 miles south of Mankato, on J ...read more

When most folks imagine the asteroids, they likely picture chunk of rocky rubble, maybe mixed in with some metals based on distant observations and flybys. They shouldn't be very complicated because they're just leftovers from the formation of the solar system. Most of the meteorites that have been sampled on Earth have a lot of the same basic minerals and elements as well.As it turns out, going out to the asteroid belt and directly sampling one of these primordial objects has turned that notion ...read more

Dating can be tricky. If your timing is off, it can result in misunderstandings. This is especially true in fields like archeology and paleontology. If an item is identified as hailing from an incorrect year, entire lines of research can be put into question. So when Sturt Manning, an archeologist from Cornell University, and colleagues received a radiocarbon date that didn’t appear to line up with the archeological evidence, they tweaked the dating technique and came up with a more definitive ...read more

For decades, the University of Michigan Library held an esteemed article. The precious paper was a letter penned by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, which included sketches of Jupiter’s moons.The library acquired the letter in 1938 and considered it a prized possession because it was evidence of Galileo’s thought process as he worked toward his understanding that the planets revolved around the sun.But a historical detective sensed it was a fake and one of many manuscripts or documents tha ...read more

When you think about the word “art,” what comes to mind? A child’s artwork pinned to the fridge? A favorite artist whose work always inspires? Abstract art that is hard to understand?Each of these assumes that making art is something that other people do, such as children or “those with talent.”However, as I explain in my book “The Expressive Instinct,” art is intrinsic to human evolution and history. Just as sports or workouts exercise the body, creating art exercises the imaginat ...read more

The woolly rhinoceros, which roamed northern Eurasia for millions of years, is one of the most iconic extinct megafauna. The formidable thick-skinned, long-furred beast occupied the mammoth steppe, a cold-dry grassland biome that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). However, roughly 10,000 years ago the woolly rhinoceros vanished. Scientists have been able to identify mummified carcasses of these animals, along with bone fragments, and several human cave paintings in Europe and Asia fe ...read more

A scholarly article once proposed that the griffin — a mythological beast with a raptor’s head, a lion’s body, and eagle’s wings — was created by ancient prospectors stumbling upon a dinosaur fossil while searching for gold in Central Asia.But something about the argument didn’t feel right to Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, who with a colleague, now debunked the study over 30 years later in an Interdisciplinary Science Reviews article.The Pop ...read more

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the most famous and spectacular sights in the Solar Systems. Wider than the diameter of the Earth, the spot is a giant vortex of winds up to 400 kilometers per hour. Its reddish color probably comes from complex organic molecules that form in its upper atmosphere, although nobody is quite sure.The Spot may have first been seen by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini in 1665 and then observed throughout his life until his death in 1712. But after that somet ...read more

The space environment is harsh and full of extreme radiation. Scientists designing spacecraft and satellites need materials that can withstand these conditions.In a paper published in January 2024, my team of materials researchers demonstrated that a next-generation semiconductor material called metal-halide perovskite can actually recover and heal itself from radiation damage.Metal-halide perovskites are a class of materials discovered in 1839 that are found abundantly in Earth’s crust. They ...read more

Every time we speak, our brains have to meticulously coordinate the movements of some 100 muscles in the face, mouth, tongue, lips, and vocal cords. Those muscles then have to fire almost instantaneously to produce the right sounds. Speech is complicated, to say the least — if something goes wrong at any point between the first neural signals and the last muscular contractions, it may result in difficulty speaking, or a disorder known as dysarthria.“When you have an interruption in that path ...read more