Arctic sea ice extent in April was nearly 394,000 square miles below the long-term average — an area one-and-a-half times the size of Texas.
The Arctic's floating lid of sea ice continued to decline in April, tying the record set last year for lowest April extent.
This makes it four straight months of record lows in 2017, leaving Arctic sea ice in a precarious state as seasonal warming accelerates with the approach of summer.
According to the latest report from th ...read more
Mouse liver cells at the end of the day (left) and the end of the night (right) after they have grown. (Credit: Ueli Schibler/University of Geneva)
Among all the organs in the human body, the liver is something of a superhero. Not only does it defend our bodies against the liquid toxins we regularly ingest, it has the ability to regenerate itself, and, as new research shows, it increases its size by nearly half over the course of a day.
Working in mice, researchers in Switzerland doc ...read more
A western spotted skunk stands on its hands to deliver a smelly attack. (Credit: Jerry W. Dragoo)
As the climate changes, many species are finding that areas they once called home are becoming less and less hospitable.
These kinds of ecological shifts are natural, but they usually happen over much longer time scales, giving animals time to adapt. Today, their surroundings could shift so fast that they become premature relics in their own environments. To avert, or perhaps ease, this transition ...read more
With Cassini already preparing for a third dive between Saturn and its rings, NASA has released this spectacular movie from the first dive
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I can’t help it — I’m just enchanted by the imagery coming back from Cassini as it has been swooping through the gap between Saturn and the giant planet’s rings. The latest is the movie above, made from a sequence of rapid-fire images acquired by Cassini as it made its first dive on April 26th.
From NA ...read more
Is oxytocin really the love and trust chemical? Or is it just the hype hormone? A new paper suggests that many studies of the relationship between oxytocin and behaviors such as trust have been flawed.
The paper is a meta-analysis just published by Norwegian researchers Mathias Valstad and colleagues. Valstad et al. found that the level of oxytocin in human blood, often used as a proxy measure of brain oxytocin, has no relation to central nervous system oxytocin levels under normal conditions. ...read more
(Credit: Champ-Ritthikrai/Shutterstock)
Your right brain is creative and your left brain is logical. This widely accepted dichotomy cleaves the brain neatly in two, but research has shown the actual division of labor in the brain is not nearly so straightforward.
Because the physical structures of both hemispheres appear identical, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientists started hashing out the differences between brain hemispheres. That crucial insight came thank ...read more
Citizen scientists learn how algorithms affect their online shopping and help researchers break open the “black box” of price-personalization
By Chelsey Meyer
Have you ever wondered whether you see the same online prices as other consumers? If not, you may want to after hearing about price personalization. While many Internet users may understand that algorithms affect their social media feeds, few realize that algorithms also personalize their online shopping experiences. Researcher ...read more
Dendrochronologist Henri Grissino-Mayer and colleagues study the tree rings in the Karr-Koussevitzky double bass. Their analysis ultimately determined that the instrument was built much later than previously thought. (Credit: Henri Grissino-Mayer)
Modern science is full of surprising analytical techniques that can be used in a wide variety of remarkable circumstances.
My favorite technique is dendrochronology—the study of “tree time.” By assigning calendar-year dates to growt ...read more
