Adelie penguins. Credit: Jean Pennycook
By: Lishka Arata
Many things distinguish penguins from rocks. There’s color difference (usually), behavior (penguins waddle, rocks don’t), social structure (rocks don’t have one) — the list goes on. But why might someone need to distinguish between rocks and penguins?
It’s a skill central to a long-term project that relies on citizen scientists, working from the comfort of their homes, to identify penguins in photographs take ...read more
LSD (in blue) fitting into a serotonin receptor (white ribbon). (Credit: Bryan Roth)
Two studies looking at one crucial receptor in our brains give different insights into the psychedelic effects of LSD.
Two separate teams of researchers publishing papers today in Cell examined how LSD binds to serotonin receptors in our brains and what the consequences of those reactions are. Their results offer an explanation for two hallmarks of LSD use: Its long-lasting effects and apparent ability to ...read more
(Credit: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock)
A week hasn’t even passed since the inauguration, but television news is saturated with the flurry of activity from President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump, via Twitter, promised to launch an investigation into illegal voting and threatened to “send in the Feds” if Chicago police can’t fix the “carnage.” And that was just between Tuesday and Wednesday.
This heightened scrutiny compelled the Internet Archive, a ...read more
Astronaut Chris Ferguson looks like a man on a mission in the new suit. (Credit: Boeing)
NASA’s astronauts will be looking a little blue in the near future—because of their striking new attire.
Boeing has introduced a line of sleeker, smarter and perhaps most-noticeably, bluer spacewear.
The suits, nick-named the “Boeing Blues,” were designed specifically for those currently being trained for flight in Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX Dragon capsules &ndash ...read more
Features on Mars like this one, a likely river delta deposit, point to a warmer ancient past. (Image: NASA/JPL)
Climate change on Earth is a well-established phenomenon, but scientists have long struggled to explain an even more dramatic change of conditions, long ago in a far-off land.
Mars is a dry, frigid planet today, with an average ground temperature of about -60 °C. Liquid water seems to be possible only under a narrow range of circumstances, but for the most part, water sublimates ...read more
From left to right: A rat-mouse chimera, regular rat and regular mouse. The rat-mouse chimera was generated by injecting mouse iPS cells into a rat embryo. (Credit: Tomoyuki Yamaguchi)
An interspecies transplant turned out to be an effective cure in diabetic mice, bringing the prospect of growing made-to-order human organs in other species a bit closer to reality.
It’s the first time that small parts of an organ, in this case pancreatic cells called islets, grown inside one&nbs ...read more
Last week, we learned that Scholarly Open Access, Jeffrey Beall’s website and blog, had gone down. Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Denver, has earned fame, and notoriety, for his list of what he calls ‘predatory’ open access publishers and journals.
It’s still not clear what led to the demise of Beall’s blog. There were rumors of possible legal threats. The University of Denver eventually released a statement saying that Beall “has decided t ...read more
A night launch for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. (Image: Flickr/SpaceX)
Launching rockets into space has traditionally been the domain of nation states: only a handful of countries over the last several decades have mounted the technical expertise and financial resources to put payloads in orbit. With so few players, outer space was governed by the “Cold War principles” outlined in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which holds nation states accountable and reserves the use of space ...read more
Geico’s “so easy a caveman can do it” advertising campaign incorrectly minimized the intelligence of Neanderthals. (Credit: Shutterstock)
(This post originally appeared in the online anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Follow @SAPIENS_org on Twitter to discover more of their work.)
For the last dozen years or so, Geico Insurance has run commercials featuring Neanderthals in modern contexts. The story line varies, but the take-home point does not: Switching to ...read more
