Despite making its appearance only once every roughly 75 years, Halley’s Comet is perhaps one of the most famous objects in the night sky. It last passed by Earth in 1986, and both astronomers and skywatchers are eagerly anticipating its return in 2061. When Halley’s Comet reappears in Earth’s skies, it will likely be a spectacle that will yet again captivate much of the world — and potentially worry some. But, since we still have some time before Halley’s Comet returns, let’s dive i ...read more

Back in the 1970s, biologists began to observe a remarkable social phenomenon in bacteria. They had long been aware that individual bacteria could sense and seek out nutrients in their environment, a phenomenon known as chemotaxis. What they hadn’t realized was that bacteria could communicate between themselves using signaling molecules. In this way, bacteria can sense the presence of others and regulate their behavior accordingly, such as becoming bioluminescent or forming biofilms when their ...read more

The Higgs boson is special kind of particle that doesn’t really appear in everyday life. Instead, it subtly interacts with many other particles and is responsible for giving them mass. Additionally, it plays a crucial role in the determining the characteristics of the forces of nature.The Discovery of Higgs Boson CERN research center, Geneva Switzerland (Credit: Dominionart/Shutterstock)In 1964, several researchers, including British physicist Peter Higgs, found a clever solution to a troublin ...read more

How do you know when an Ice Age teen hits puberty? You can see it in their bones.A research group for the first time applied a technique initially developed for contemporary clinical observations to Paleolithic fossils. They reported in the Journal of Human Evolution that Ice Age teens experienced the same physiological changes as contemporary young adolescents at roughly the same time. Ice Age Bones Reveal Clues About AdolescenceThe scientists studied the bones of 13 ancient humans between 10 a ...read more

The Fermi paradox boils down to a simple question: where is everybody? In other words, if we’re not alone in the universe, then why haven’t we seen any evidence for aliens yet? To date, there is no consensus resolution to the Fermi Paradox…and we still have no evidence for aliens.Who Came Up With the Fermi Paradox?(Credit: Janusz Pienkowski/Shutterstock)Lore has it that in the summer of 1950, famed Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was out to lunch one day with some friends and colle ...read more

If you live in southern California, then it would come as no surprise that the ground could start shaking at any time. That’s because this part of the country is prone to earthquakes.But it might come as a surprise that this isn’t the only part of the country where the ground could and has started shaking. Central Virginia and the Lowcountry of South Carolina, for example, have and could in the future be home to the next big earthquake.It's these unexpected hotspots that can inflict the most ...read more

Chicory appears to be having a moment. Although the plant’s use has long been associated with New Orleans coffee, it is catching on globally. Some people are using it as a coffee supplement. Others are completely replacing coffee with chicory. And still others are adding it to other foods, for a variety of purported health benefits.Whatever the uses and reasons behind them, chicory sales are booming. One report estimated the global chicory market at $685 million in 2020 and is projected to hit ...read more

Our planet still can't seem to beat the heat.Last month was the warmest August on record. "Sweltering" was the word used by the normally staid National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to sum up the findings of its regular monthly analysis. And August wasn't just a one-off. By NASA's independent calculation, last month caps the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere since global record-keeping began in the 1800s. It also extends our planet's heat streak to 15 straight months of record s ...read more

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death.Usually, scientists consider death to be the irreversible halt of functioning of an organism as a whole. However, practices such as organ donation highlight how organs, tissues and cells can continue to function even after an organism’s demise. This resilience raises ...read more

If you haven’t given it much thought, you probably think non-human animals see the world the same way we do. The truth is the world looks very different to most other animals than it does to us.And this discrepancy between how non-human animals see the world and how we do can be a problem for wildlife biologists. To address this, Daniel Hanley, biologist at George Mason University and his team published their results in PLOS Biology on a new recording system that could help better capture how ...read more