Your dog may act like a good listener—but does she really notice when you’re feeling down? Or does she just know how to deploy a wet nose and a tail-wag to earn treats? A new study says negative emotions are contagious for dogs. They’ll pick up a companion’s bad feelings just by sound, whether that companion is human or canine.
“Emotional contagion” is the most basic form of empathy, write Annika Huber of the University of Vienna’s Cleve ...read more
Airglow, as seen from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)
On rare occasions throughout history, the darkness of night fails to materialize. Even with the moon darkened, the sky fills with a diffuse glow that seems to filter out of the very air itself. Such “bright nights” have been recorded back to the days of Pliny the Elder around 132 B.C., although explanations for the phenomenon have been lacking.
Using a special interferometer and data from the 1990s, two Can ...read more
“Waste not, want not.”
The origin of this proverb traces back centuries, but time has hardly tarnished its relevance. It’s a warning every generation would do well to heed: Mismanaging precious commodities today will lead to an impoverished future. It’s so simple. It’s so true. It’s so often ignored.
Case-in-point: global industrial fishing operations. Over the past decade, fishing fleets simply threw away more than 10 percent—enough to fill 4,500 Olymp ...read more
This enhanced-color image of Jupiter was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt /Seán Doran)
After a bit of an absence for vacation, and to finish work on a feature article on Arctic climate change and geopolitics for bioGraphic magazine, I’m back to blogging here at ImaGeo. And when I spotted this arresting imag ...read more
Excerpt from the Apollo 11 transcript. NASA.
One hundred and 31 hours, 42 minutes, and 30 seconds into the mission, the crew of Apollo 11 was reunited and preparing for the trans earth injection burn that would send them out of the Moon’s orbit and on a path back home. Command Module Mike Collins was still in his pressure suit — mission rules said the astronauts much be suited when redocking the Command and Lunar modules — and was getting ready to take it off for the TEI burn ...read more
(Credit: Everett Collection/Shutterstock)
Humans are sort of nature’s wimps.
Relatively speaking, our physical prowess just doesn’t match up to the rest of the animal kingdom. Our lack of brawn is a result of our our big, energy-hungry brains, an adaption that seems to have worked out pretty well, all things considered. Still, without the aid of tools and traps, creatures who call the wilderness home present a clear threat. Even when compared to our closest cousins, chimpanzee ...read more
I’ve recently been doing some of every academic’s favorite activity – marking student essays (papers).
Here’s a few observations on essays and on marking them.
1. Marking Essays is Subjective
This is a bit of a truism: it’s fairly obvious that not everyone will agree on how to grade an essay down to the exact mark. Unlike with, say, a multiple-choice exam, marking an essay is not a mechanical process. But it’s easy to forget this when the marks are there in ...read more
(Credit: Zarya Maxim Alexandrovich/Shutterstock)
Our lives are awash in tunes. Songs are blasted through the radio, piped into supermarkets, they waft through the air at public gatherings and soundtracks can make or break a blockbuster movie.
Humans seem obsessed with melody and rhythm. But when did it begin in hominin history? What purpose does it fulfill? And does music have a dark side?
The first bands started gigging at least tens of thousands of years. Archaeologists have found 40,000-yea ...read more
Well thank you for the kind words, Pietro Michelucci (founder of EyesOnALZ, a crowdsourcing platform designed to accelerate Alzheimer’s research). Pietro is one of 15 project and platform partners we’ve been working with to test and deploy a suite of new citizen science tools.
For the past two years, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, the SciStarter team has been hard at work building tools, partnerships, and methodologies to help connect millions of citizen scie ...read more
