Elephants are no pushovers when it comes to walking great distances every day, and they even seem to have a knack for planning their demanding journeys. A new study puts the ingenuity of these mammals on full display, showing how they strategically choose certain routes to make their trips as efficient as possible. The study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, shares several key findings that demonstrate how African savanna elephants move through challenging landscapes. Being the large ...read more

Within glacial ice sheets, there are streams of ice, sometimes called ice rivers, that move much faster than the surrounding ice. If you’re having trouble imagining how ice moves inside ice, Elizabeth Thomas, a paleoclimatologist at the University at Buffalo, suggests an analogy to help visualize these icebound rivers.Since the Gulf Stream carries warm water from the tropical Atlantic Ocean up the coast of the Carolinas and then across to Europe, she explains, “the Gulf Stream is essentially ...read more

Mosquitoes are more than pests. They’re also a mortal threat, contributing to millions of cases of malaria a year. Fortunately for humans, however, a team of researchers has recently identified a medication that could curb mosquito populations, controlling their spread of malaria. Revealing their results in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers report that the medication nitisinone makes human blood deadly to mosquitoes. “One way to stop the spread of diseases ...read more

Humanity’s search for life on Mars has taken a significant step forward with the discovery of organic molecules that resemble key building blocks of life on Earth.Since landing in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has made multiple discoveries suggesting that Mars may have once had habitable conditions. Now, scientists have identified the longest organic molecules ever found on the Red Planet — offering new insights into its potential to support life.A detailed report on these findings was rece ...read more

Neutrinos are the most ubiquitous particles — a hundred billion zip through your fingertip each second — yet they have no charge, almost no mass, and they barely interact with other matter. A century ago, when the Italian physicist Wolfgang Pauli predicted their existence, it wasn’t even clear how to look for them. "I have done a terrible thing,” he famously said. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.” Fortunately, he spoke too soon. Neutrinos are in fact detectable, ...read more

A mouthful of chewing gum might also be a mouthful of microplastics, according to the results of a small pilot study. The research, presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society, suggests that a single piece of chewing gum could introduce as many as 3,000 microplastic particles into the saliva, positioning them for potential ingestion.“Our goal is not to alarm anybody,” said Sanjay Mohanty, a study author and an engineering professor at the University of California, Los An ...read more

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has caught yet another spectacle in a newly released image of a “cosmic tornado” forming billows of gas and dust that appear to be crowned with a spiral galaxy. This colorful display, known as Herbig-Haro 49/50, illustrates an outflow that was originally launched from a young star and is now zipping through space at breakneck speed. The galaxy sitting at the summit of the colorful arc is really much more distant than it seems and entirely unrelated ...read more

If you’re already on your second cup of coffee from the office coffee machine, you may want to take a moment to reconsider. While there is plenty of information out there on the benefits and concerns of drinking coffee, a new study published in Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases reports that specific coffee machines, typically found in the workplace, contain high amounts of a substance that can elevate the body's low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. LDL cholesterol can lead to card ...read more

Immunotherapy is an innovative way to harness the power of the body’s immune system to fight threats like cancer. Normally, our immune system can detect and destroy abnormal cells on its own. But when cancer develops, it often uses tactics to fool the immune system, allowing the cancer to grow unchecked.Chemotherapy is one of the most common cancer treatments, but it comes with a heavy toll on the body due to harsh side effects. Immunotherapy, on the other hand, holds the potential to minimize ...read more

To many people, a rock is just a rock. If anyone has been house shopping, you know how realtors will mention that the countertops are "granite" and you might wonder why, from house to house, they all look so different. Turns out (much to the chagrin of geologists in the housing market), those countertops are likely neither granite nor all the same type of rock. That's because rocks are made of different minerals and rocks get their names (mostly) from what minerals they contain.Now, much of the ...read more