As the summer wraps up, it is also time to wrap up my tour of the Cascade Range volcanoes as seen from space. The modern Cascades extend into Northern California and is the home of likely the largest volcano of the chain ... but the Earth's plates are plotting the end of the Cascades, starting from California.The ocean plates that spawn the magma that forms the Cascade volcanoes are young and small. The Juan de Fuca plate is responsible for the volcanoes from Oregon to British Columbia (save for ...read more

When you look at a crocodile, it’s easy to feel like you’re staring into the distant past. These ancient-looking reptiles, with their scaly skin and fearsome teeth, seem like living fossils — creatures frozen in time, unchanged for millions of years.But despite their prehistoric appearance, animals like crocodiles are not truly evolutionary relics. In fact, they’ve been evolving all along, just not in ways that are immediately obvious.The Illusion of Living FossilsThe concept of living f ...read more

If you’ve been tuning into the recent news, perhaps you’re aware that NASA recently made the difficult decision to delay bringing astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) home on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. The reason? Safety concerns. The spacecraft encountered several technical issues that teams on the ground simply couldn’t overlook. As a result, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been instructed to remain in orbit – at least until a pod from SpaceX, a long ...read more

One of the great endeavors of modern science is to understand the brain. This organ, the most complex machine we know, is a miracle of evolutionary biology. It processes a potent firehose of information to set goals, achieve tasks and navigate complex environments, often in ways that put the world’s most powerful supercomputers to shame. Remarkably, it weighs about the same as a bag of flour and runs on little more than a bowl of porridge.And yet, at the heart of this amazing capability is a p ...read more

It’s an old platitude and hoary chestnut: Life is all about balance.But sometimes we can find wisdom in even the most tired cliches. Balance is especially true in terms of managing your body’s intake of its two most abundant minerals: phosphorus and calcium.Although they each have specific functions, they work together to build and maintain strong bones and teeth. And each mineral’s efficacy depends on the amount of the other. Too much phosphorus or not enough calcium in your diet can incr ...read more

Up until recently, humans have been known as the only species to surgically remove limbs to increase a wounded individual’s chances of survival. Chimps have medically treated injuries of the wounded, ants have carried inebriated nest mates home to sleep it off — but selectively amputating limbs to save the life of another is distinctly a human behavior.But Erik Frank, a biologist at the University of Würzburg, recently discovered that when the leg of a Camponotus floridanus ant was injured, ...read more

Judging only by the blistering summer sun, you’d be forgiven for assuming that space is a hothouse. But despite the tremendous energy pouring out of trillions and trillions of stars, our universe is surprisingly arctic.To understand why, we first need to wrap our heads around temperature because its true nature isn’t obvious when you burn your hand on the stove or dive into an icy lake. When scientists talk about hot and cold, they’re referring to the average kinetic energy of a system (wh ...read more

If you were to conjure up the strangest, hodge-podge creation of a bird in your mind, it would likely not be nearly as strange as the hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazi), a species native to the Amazon rainforest that is also known as the stink bird or the flying cow.That altogether unflattering name is apt, as this bird is renowned for the stench it leaves behind. What exactly makes the hoatzin so stinky is its unique digestive system. As its diet is almost exclusively made up of leaves, the hoatzin h ...read more

For decades, it was thought that the cause of death of the child from Cerro El Plomo was hypothermia. The naturally freeze-dried body of a child from 560 years ago – approximately 8 years old – is now considered one of the most important anthropological artifacts in Chile and a testament to the Inca Empire.He was found with his arms crossed around his legs and his head resting on his right shoulder and arm, as if he had fallen asleep that way. Researchers believed that he had consumed corn c ...read more

You’ve probably heard that it’s extremely difficult for adults to learn a second language. You may even have proof: You tried it yourself, and it didn’t work. But maybe that’s because you took the wrong approach.Stephen Krashen has a better idea. In the 1980s, Krashen, now professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, developed the Comprehensible Input Theory of language acquisition. The word acquisition, as opposed to learning, is key. Learning is what you did in school: ...read more