Chilesaurus diegosuarezi, a Jurassic herbivore at the heart of a controversial dinosaur family tree rewrite. (Credit Gabriel Lío)
Remember that paper that dropped a few months ago completely rewriting the dinosaur family tree? Well, the researchers are back, this time using one of the odder dinos out there as evidence for their explosive claim. Is it legit or just hype?
Back in March, researchers argued for a total takedown of the long-established dinosaur family tree.
Today, Matthe ...read more
Psychedelic mushrooms. (Credit: atomazul/Shutterstock)
Scientists have known about psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” ever since Albert Hofmann isolated it in 1958. It’s taken until now, however, for them to figure out how it’s produced.
Researchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany sequenced the genomes of two psychedelic mushroom species and used the information to identify four key enzymes involved in the process of ...read more
Volcanologists at the IAVCEI meeting in Portland.
So, this whole week I’ll be taking part in the IAVCEI meeting in Portland, Oregon. Of course, most people have never heard of IAVCEI, which is an abbreviation of the International Association of Volcanology and the Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (now you can see why we use the abbreviation.) This meeting is bringing together over 1,200 volcanologists and petrologists (who study magma, not petroleum) from all over world to tal ...read more
If you’ve never seen a master lathe operator at work, I highly recommend it. Deft movements and practiced flourishes turn a block of spinning wood into a bedpost, top, bowl or some other circular object, each motion peeling away curls of wood to uncover the beauty hidden inside.
It’s hard to explain why the motions feel so right, but there is an undeniable allure to the work, as if it scratches an itch you didn’t know you had.
As it will, the internet discovered lathe tur ...read more
The summit of Mt. Erebus. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
You could say Antarctica sings a song of fire and ice.
The continent’s frigid reputation is well known, but researchers from the University of Edinburgh analyzed radar scans of the West Antarctic Rift System and found 138 volcanoes hiding under the thick ice sheet. Of those, 91 were previously unidentified, they say, and the discovery could change our understanding of how the overlaying ice layer grows and shrinks.
Hidden Volcanoes
Th ...read more
No sooner had I published my last post, on the much-discussed “women’s brains are more active than men’s” study, than another neuroscience paper triggered a fresh media storm. This time, the subject was videogames, and the headlines were alarming:
Here’s the paper, published in Molecular Psychiatry by University of Montreal researchers Gregory West and colleagues. The truth is that this paper doesn’t say anything about brain “rotting” or “dis ...read more
The NAVYA. (Credit: Christina Reed)
France may be famous for its cheese and wine, but it’s also a longtime leader in driverless transit. Paris boasted one of the earliest models of automatic trains in 1983, when two metro lines ran without a conductor onboard. And the push toward driverless transportation continues in this city, with several planned upgrades before it plays host to the summer Olympics in 2024.
So it was with high expectations and a sense of history that I boarded the dri ...read more
The American embassy in Havana, Cuba. (Credit: Shutterstock)
U.S.-Cuban relations have taken an unusual turn after several U.S. diplomats, and at least one Canadian diplomat, experienced hearing damage after being targeted by a covert “sonic device” in Havana.
Huh? A what?
On Wednesday, U.S. officials who spoke to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity revealed that in the fall on 2016, at least five U.S. diplomats began experiencing unexplainable hearing loss and other ...read more
Rock smashes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. The rules behind the favorite game of schoolyard kids and adults deciding who takes out the trash are pretty simple. But they also represent a kind of logic problem. Four-year-olds can learn the rules, and so can chimpanzees—but the differences in how kids and apes become proficient reveal a little about how their minds work.
The relationship between the three items in rock-paper-scissors is circular. There isn& ...read more
