In 2016, astronomer Vera C. Rubin died at the age of 88. Three years later, Congress designated the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile in her honor. The telescope at the observatory will have the largest digital camera yet and is expected to go online in 2025. The camera will snap constant pictures for the next 10 years as part of a mapping project that will capture the changing sky.Shooting stars, supernovas, meteors, and comets will all be caught on camera. But the observatory will als ...read more

It’s humbling to realize that much of high-school math, so vexing to so many of us, was already well understood thousands of years ago. The Egyptians came nowhere near E=mc2, but they knew how to find the volume of a pyramid. The Greeks didn’t conjure up calculus, but they did determine the area of a circle and proved it. Seen in historical context, these calculations are hardly less impressive than those of Einstein or Newton.The modern world, with its digital computers and internal combust ...read more

Muscle dysmorphia is a mental health condition where a person perceives their body as weak and smaller than it actually is. It’s a form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder, and recent research shows that social media could have a major influence on this condition.Prevalence of muscle dysmorphia is not well understood, though it mostly affects men. Studies suggest between 1.7 percent and 2.4 percent of people may meet the criteria. In Canada, experts found that one in four of 2,000 adolescent participa ...read more

Being a giant predator during the Pleistocene — from around 2.6 million years to about 11,000 years ago — was no easy feat. From short-faced bears to Ice Age coyotes, American cheetahs, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and American lions, competition was a plenty, and staying alive was a daily battle. But yet, this mega-bear was still the apex predator of its time, thriving across North America for millions of years.“Just in the last 13,000 years, we’ve lost most of the big mammals on th ...read more

In April 2022, forestry workers started a small number of fires in the Santa Fe National Forest near a remote mountain called Hermit’s Peak. The plan, part of a nationwide program of controlled burns, was to thin out the dense pine woodlands to reduce the risk of a bigger, uncontrolled burn later.The team was aware of the two ways that wildfires usually spread. The first is via direct contact with nearby trees and grass, which is relatively easy to predict. But the second is much harder. Known ...read more

The observation of living cells is undergoing a revolution as various techniques have increased the resolution of microscopy images to the nanometer scale. Cells are crowded, complex, three-dimensional environments. That makes the full panoply hard to study simultaneously because much of it takes place above or below the microscope’s narrow focal plane. One way of solving this is a technique known as expansion microscopy, in which the cell is filled with a polymer that expands when it is place ...read more

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food — and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.So food scientists and a few companies are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse- ...read more

Other than the sloth, whose smile is pretty much permanently attached, the non-human animal most associated with smiling is the bottlenose dolphin. But somewhat like the sloth, the dolphin’s smile is just a feature of the way its mouth turns up at the sides. A dolphin that appears to be smiling at you when it bobs up beside your boat might not be thinking, “Hey, let’s be friends!” even though it’s difficult for humans to interpret that delightful expression any other way.But if dolphin ...read more

Bright, burning lava surging from a fissure on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula is so voluminous that it's easily visible to orbiting satellites. The image above, which is about three and a half miles across, was created using data acquired by the Landsat 9 satellite on November 24th. If you look carefully at the left-most extension of the flowing lava you can make out a couple of turquoise-colored spots. This is Iceland's iconic Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa that attracts tourists from around the ...read more