(Credit: Shutterstock) A true Scotch drinker doesn’t pour an aged Macallan in order to, as less refined revelers might say, “get the party started.” Quite the contrary, the seasoned aficionado attends to certain norms and customs before imbibing, not unlike a traditional tea ceremony, in a nod to enlightenment, restraint and discernment—the finer things. The experts recommend pouring Scotch into a tulip-shaped glass to swirl the matured flavors. Sip, but never gulp, as ...read more

(Credit: unoL/Shutterstock) Tiny robots powered by bubbles have successfully treated an infection in mice. The achievement is another step forward in a field that has long shown promise, and is only now beginning to deliver. The therapeutic robots in this case were tiny spheres of magnesium and titanium coated with an antibacterial agent and about the width of a human hair. They were released into the stomach, where they swam around and delivered a drug to the target before dissolving. Ro ...read more

Apollo 10 photograph taken from the Lunar Module “Snoopy” showing the Command Module “Charlie Brown” with Mt. Marilyn in the background (north is to the left, scene is 80 km wide). (Credit: LROC) In 1968, Jim Lovell became the first human to pilot a spacecraft — Apollo 8 — around another world. And two years later, his Apollo 13 heroics earned him an eternal place in spaceflight history. But those feats also left Lovell as the only person to visit the moon t ...read more

Endangered piping plovers are a precocial species, which means they mobile after emerging their egg. (Credit: Shutterstock) Protecting species in peril doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, it’s all about stringing together small wins that, in the long-term, make all the difference. A little luck can also go far. When waves surged on the Pennsylvania coast of Lake Erie early this summer, it could easily have been the end for a nest of piping plover eggs caught in the water’s path ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Social media has been a boon to social science. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms serve as online laboratories that reveal all kinds of stuff about the users, researchers say. The rise of these platforms has sparked a flurry of scientific papers describing people’s social network interactions. A lot of the conclusions of the studies can engender the response, “Well, no kidding.” But offering validation for intuitive or common sense knowle ...read more

The two towers of the Schaeberle Camera and the rock wall at Jeur (India), with overlall height lowered by use of a pit for the plate-holder. Credit: Mary Lea Shane Archives By Dr. Liz MacDonald, founder of Aurorasaurus and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This blog reposted from blog.aurorasaurus.org. Over a century ago, American astronomer W.W. Campbell set up a 40 foot ‘Schaeberle camera’ in Jeur, India to take pictures and study various properties of the su ...read more

That makes last month one of the warmest our planet has experienced since record-keeping began in 1880 This graph shows how each month since 1880 has varied from the annual mean for the entire globe. The curve shows the seasonal cycle, with the warmest temperatures occurring during summer in the Northern Hemisphere. July 2017 tied with July 2016 for the second warmest such month on record — and was one of the warmest months in the record overall. (Source: NASA GISS) Up in the high north, ...read more

Last year, psychologists B. Keith Payne and colleagues breathed new life into the debate over ‘social priming’ with a paper called Replicable effects of primes on human behavior. Behavioral or social priming – the idea that subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on our behaviour – was a major topic of research for many years, but it’s since been largely discredited. The field’s reputation suffered when Diederik Stapel, a leader in the field, was ...read more

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