Mount Spurr is only about 75 miles from Anchorage in Alaska. More than half the population of the northernmost state live in the Anchorage area. On top of that, a surprisingly large amount of air cargo traffic passes through its international airport not to mention the military aircraft from Ellsworth Air Force Base. So, any time a volcano close to such a vital hub begins to get restless, it is time to pay attention.Spurr Gets RestlessEarlier this month, the Alaska Volcano Observatory raised th ...read more

When it comes to life and its history on Earth, meteorite impacts have been one of the ever-present threats to total extinction. It's even possible that life may have had multiple beginnings — with early iterations being utterly destroyed by the impact of a massive body early in Earth's history.We know, though, that life has managed to expand and diversify into almost every available ecological niche on the planet and that all life on Earth can be traced back to a last universal common ancesto ...read more

Many factors influence our languages and accents — where we live, where we grew up, what our parents sounded like. But in recent years, researchers have been investigating another possible influence — climate. The idea that climate affects language is not new, but only recently have researchers had the tools to properly investigate the hypothesis. Now, large databases of languages from around the world, coupled with the computing power to look for patterns in those languages and match those ...read more

Thanks to a massive flare and explosion on the Sun that spewed material toward Earth, millions of people were treated recently to displays of red, green and pink lights in the sky. Dazzling aurora borealis displays like this usually are visible only in far northern and southern parts of the globe. But overnight on Oct. 10 and 11, they lit up the skies as far south as Texas. It was all the result of a severe geomagnetic storm triggered by a coronal mass ejection that had occurred together with an ...read more

Coughing, wheezing, and struggling to catch your breath — bronchitis can turn a simple cold into something much more uncomfortable. But beyond the symptoms, one question often comes to mind: Is bronchitis contagious? With respiratory illnesses often spreading in workplaces, schools, and homes, it’s important to know how bronchitis works so you can protect yourself. So, let’s explore what bronchitis is, how long it lasts, how to prevent it, and whether you should worry about catching it fro ...read more

At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, five eels live in the Amazon Rising habitat, where probes in the water sense their electricity and transmit their energy to a lightbar and a speaker.At any given time, visitors can hear low-voltage pulsing coming from the speakers. If guests push a button, they can summon bubbles or make it rain in the habitat. The eels become more active, and their electricity increases.Scientists have long known that electric eels are indeed electric. But in the wild, they are ...read more

For most animals imprinted with spooky names, their "Boo" is much worse than their bite. Humans generally judge grotesque-looking organisms by appearance, so they conjure up nomenclature that would look right at home on the movie marquee for a "Creature Feature." But even the most menacing-looking animals with shudder-inducing names are more Treat than Trick — as long as they are treated with respect and given the space they need to thrive in their natural environment.1. Goblin Shark(Credit: 3 ...read more

The lost expedition of John Franklin is a classic tale of traveling gone wrong. When the British Royal Navy officer set out from England with two ships in 1845, their goal was to forge a way through the Arctic Ocean to open up the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, none of the 129 men who sailed out with the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror ever returned. Reports from rescue missions, Inuit in the area and subsequent forensic and archaeological work on human and nonhuman remains have since pieced to ...read more

The Moon is anything but a lifeless rock hanging in our sky. It has pockets of water ice trapped on its surface, caves in which astronauts might one day live, and even an incredibly tenuous atmosphere known as an exosphere.That thin layer of atoms, which begins at the lunar surface and extends 100 kilometers (60 miles) into space, exists mostly because small micrometeoroids strike the surface, vaporizing atoms and lofting some into the void. That’s according to a new study published in Science ...read more

Languages are a lot like living organisms. Both evolve over time, allowing an ancestral tongue like Latin to sire diverse descendants — Spanish, French, Romanian — that are more closely related to each other than to, say, Korean. This much is old news; Charles Darwin himself noted the resemblance. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species,” he writes in The Descent of Man, “are curiously parallel.”Now, new research shows that the analogy runs deeper. Islands, long ...read more