After a late dinner, a jungle-dwelling whip spider can’t rely on an Uber driver to get her home. She has to find the way herself, in the pitch-black, picking her way over thick undergrowth to reach the tree she lives on. It’s a trick she can even manage when plucked from her home tree and tossed into the forest at random, up to 10 meters away. Now scientists think whip spiders don’t use her eyes for this homing feat—they use their feet.
Whip spiders hunt b ...read more
(Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech)
Extraterrestrial objects are constantly bombarding Earth; thankfully the vast majority are microscopic.
Thanks to the planet’s atmosphere, we live largely unaware of this celestial fusillade, which averages about 100 tons a day and mostly burns up long before hitting the ground. From the few that do make impact, researchers can gather clues about the composition of our solar system, with the goal of understanding how planets and other b ...read more
“I am fearful this will affect the Arctic in ways that we have not seen yet” — Margot Wallström, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden
Donald J. Trump walks out of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn in as America’s 45th President. (Source: White House Facebook page)
Note: I’ve written this from Tromsø, Norway, where I’m covering the Arctic Frontiers conference. A version of this commentary is also scheduled to be published in the Norwegian newspaper Da ...read more
A train carries human visitors to the futuristic amusement park of “Westworld” populated by robot hosts. Credit: HBO
Nobody would accuse the HBO show “Westworld” of being a sunny science fiction tale about artificial intelligence. The show features humanlike robot “hosts” who live, die, and live again to serve the fantasies of human guests visiting a Western-themed amusement park. But the dark premise of “Westworld” is still&n ...read more
By: Russ Campbell
I grew up in Fishtown, Philadelphia, an inner city grid of red-brick row homes, corner bars, candy shops, and barely-breathing factories. Fishtown was not known for its wildlife. There were birds. A wide variety, if two counts as a wide variety: big birds (pigeons) and small birds (sparrows). There were cats and an occasional dog that escaped out of someone’s yard.
On rare occasions, I’d see a squirrel scampering about on the telephone pole in my backyard. This was ...read more
Benjamin, the last living thylacine (as far as we know), photographed in 1933 at Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo, three years before his death. Credit: Photographer unknown, Wikimedia Commons.
While I have mixed feelings about de-extinction, particularly for animals that have been out of the picture for thousands of years (I’m looking at you, woolly mammoth), I’d argue the species with the strongest case for giving it a shot would be Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Tas ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
The concept of being able to predict the sex of a baby during early pregnancy or even influence it by eating or doing certain things when trying to conceive has been the subject of public fascination and debate for many centuries. But surely the sex of a fetus is exclusively determined by the father’s sperm, carrying an X chromosome for girls and a Y chromosome for boys?
It turns out this is not the full story. Since the 17th century, it has been recognized that sl ...read more
“Our results revealed characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with Gangnam Style”. So say the authors of a new paper called Neural correlates of the popular music phenomenon.
The authors, Qiaozhen Chen et al. from Zhejiang in China, used fMRI to record brain activity while 15 volunteers listened to two musical pieces: Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style‘ and a “light music” control, Richard Clayderman’s piano piece ‘A Comme Amour‘.
Chen ...read more
La Niña typically cools the Pacific. But this time, large swathes of warmer-than-average sea temperatures have muted the cooling.
A comparison of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean for two seven-day periods: Dec. 28, 1998 to Jan. 3, 1999; and Dec. 26, 2016 to Jan. 1, 2017. The strong La Niña of 1998/1999 is characterized by widespread blue colors concentrated especially along the equator west of South America. Whereas today’s Pacific i ...read more
