Smoke from the fires appears to have blown all the way across North America and more than half way across the Atlantic Smoke and heat from raging wildfires in Idaho and Montana are seen in this animation of satellite images acquired on Sept. 3, 2017. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As of this afternoon, 77 large fires are burning across 1.4 million acres in eight western U.S. states. That’s an area more than three times the size of Houston. The burning is part of a long-term trend of incr ...read more

Dating of Neanderthals gone awry? Remains of our hominin cousins previously found in Croatia’s Vindija Cave return to the spotlight with new research that claims earlier studies got their age very wrong. (Credit Ivor Karavani) With every new find, our understanding of the twilight of the Neanderthals, our nearest hominin kin, advances. Or not. New research on some of the most famous Neanderthal fossils, from Croatia’s Vindija Cave, suggest earlier analysis about their age ...read more

Security experts are both thrilled and anxious about the internet of things (IoT), the ever-growing collection of smart electronic gadgets that interact with the world around them. It includes devices like internet-connected garage door openers, refrigerators you can text to see if you’re low on milk and tennis rackets that offer tips on a better backhand — even smart sex toys. The technology research firm Gartner estimates that 6.4 billion such IoT devices were connected online in ...read more

Satellite images centered on Houston taken on May 2, before Harvey, and Aug. 31, 2017, afterward. (Source: NASA Worldview) As Harvey has lumbered to the northeast, the clouds have dissipated, finally giving satellites a clear view of what the 1,000-year flooding event in southeast Texas looks like. The animation above tells the tale. Image source: NASA Worldview I created it using images acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite, the first on May 2nd, long before Harvey stormed asho ...read more

(Credit: Essento) A Swiss supermarket is doing its part to get Westerners hooked on the eco-friendly superfood of the future: bugs. Coop is one of Switzerland’s largest food retailers with over 2,200 outlets throughout the country, and it operates as a co-op with some 2.5 million members. Recently, Coop started stocking bug burgers and bug balls (like falafel) that are made by fellow Swiss company Essento. And according to Essento, the burgers and balls, made with ground mealworm and othe ...read more

Researchers on their way into the field. (Credit: Gail Ashton) A perennial problem for climate science is that much of it lies in the realm of abstraction. Various models and forecasts compete for relevance, based on arcane statistical formulations that appear as so much gibberish to science reporters and readers alike. Well, rest easy, weary travelers — here’s a climate study that leaves the ponderous math behind in favor of a real-world simulation of warming A ...read more

Yes, Frog and Toad Are Friends, but they aren’t moral authorities for your children. That’s the finding of a new, fun-spoiling study on little kids and picture books. It found that kids learned a lesson about sharing from a book with human characters—but not from a book about a cute raccoon. Many children’s books, of course, feature animals that act like people. And anthropomorphized animals have been imparting moral lessons since the time of Aes ...read more

Grand Prismatic Spring, one of the geothermal features of the Yellowstone Caldera. Photo by Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia CC-by-SA 3.0 Let’s cut to the chase: The purported NASA plan to “defuse” Yellowstone is pure science fiction. OK, now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into the details of the numerous articles that have jumped all over what might best be termed a “thought experiment” by scientists at NASA. Yellowstone, the massive caldera in the mi ...read more