A western spotted skunk stands on its hands to deliver a smelly attack. (Credit: Jerry W. Dragoo)
As the climate changes, many species are finding that areas they once called home are becoming less and less hospitable.
These kinds of ecological shifts are natural, but they usually happen over much longer time scales, giving animals time to adapt. Today, their surroundings could shift so fast that they become premature relics in their own environments. To avert, or perhaps ease, this transition ...read more
With Cassini already preparing for a third dive between Saturn and its rings, NASA has released this spectacular movie from the first dive
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I can’t help it — I’m just enchanted by the imagery coming back from Cassini as it has been swooping through the gap between Saturn and the giant planet’s rings. The latest is the movie above, made from a sequence of rapid-fire images acquired by Cassini as it made its first dive on April 26th.
From NA ...read more
Is oxytocin really the love and trust chemical? Or is it just the hype hormone? A new paper suggests that many studies of the relationship between oxytocin and behaviors such as trust have been flawed.
The paper is a meta-analysis just published by Norwegian researchers Mathias Valstad and colleagues. Valstad et al. found that the level of oxytocin in human blood, often used as a proxy measure of brain oxytocin, has no relation to central nervous system oxytocin levels under normal conditions. ...read more
(Credit: Champ-Ritthikrai/Shutterstock)
Your right brain is creative and your left brain is logical. This widely accepted dichotomy cleaves the brain neatly in two, but research has shown the actual division of labor in the brain is not nearly so straightforward.
Because the physical structures of both hemispheres appear identical, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientists started hashing out the differences between brain hemispheres. That crucial insight came thank ...read more
Citizen scientists learn how algorithms affect their online shopping and help researchers break open the “black box” of price-personalization
By Chelsey Meyer
Have you ever wondered whether you see the same online prices as other consumers? If not, you may want to after hearing about price personalization. While many Internet users may understand that algorithms affect their social media feeds, few realize that algorithms also personalize their online shopping experiences. Researcher ...read more
Dendrochronologist Henri Grissino-Mayer and colleagues study the tree rings in the Karr-Koussevitzky double bass. Their analysis ultimately determined that the instrument was built much later than previously thought. (Credit: Henri Grissino-Mayer)
Modern science is full of surprising analytical techniques that can be used in a wide variety of remarkable circumstances.
My favorite technique is dendrochronology—the study of “tree time.” By assigning calendar-year dates to growt ...read more
(Credit: EJ Hersom/Department of Defense)
It’s a familiar scene that played out most recently at the London marathon: An exhausted runner staggers and falls in the home stretch, unable to will their legs forward another step. It’s an extreme example of a phenomenon endurance athletes come to know intimately, often called “hitting the wall,” or sometimes by the more offbeat term “bonking.”
The proverbial wall appears when our bodies have run out of store ...read more
A Simon and Garfunkel song comes to mind—and that has scientists scratching their heads as the spacecraft heads today for a second dive.
In this illustration, the Cassini spacecraft is shown diving between Saturn and the planet’s innermost ring. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
As the Cassini spacecraft swooped between Saturn and its innermost ring on April 26th, one of its instruments listened for the sounds of its passage through the heretofore unexplored region. What it heard was of g ...read more
A Camellia sinensis shrub. (Credit: LiZhi Gao Lab)
The first draft tea tree genome is revealing how the world’s most popular beverage developed its unique flavors and soothing properties.
Despite the wide variety of teas that adorn store shelves today, there is just one species of plant that produces tea leaves. Two varieties of Camellia sinensis, a type of evergreen shrub, are responsible for everything from Masala chai to oolong teas, with small variations in the way the leaves ar ...read more
