Many adults can remember the days when their screen time was limited to Saturday morning cartoons, as well as their class’s weekly visit to the computer lab to play Oregon Trail. It was a quick half-hour of fatigued oxen, snakebites, and surprise bouts of dysentery.Over the past few decades, screen time has expanded from an occasional treat to a full-day affair. People of all ages stare at screens for work, school, and entertainment. Within the last two decades, scientists have increasingly st ...read more

Although volcanic eruptions can strike when least expected, they sometimes give off warning signs that can be captured by advanced technology. One innovative way to monitor eruptions is now being put to the test at the Reykjanes Peninsula, a hotbed of volcanic activity in Iceland. In a new study, researchers have reported the successful progress of an eruption warning system that uses distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which can anticipate volcanic activity through magma movements beneath the s ...read more

Instead of targeted, aggressive attacks, sharks may bite humans out of self-defense. Within the media, sharks are often seen as bloodthirsty predators. However, shark attacks are rare and, for the most part, not fatal. Researchers explain how sharks bite for a number of reasons, including being territorial, deterring competition, and, of course, for predation. And now, researchers are looking at self-defense against humans as another possible reason, according to new research published in Front ...read more

Researchers developed a polymer-based therapy that can be injected following a heart attack that helps heart tissue heal. After administering it to rats, they demonstrated that it works up to five weeks later, they reported in the journal Advanced Materials.Heart attacks are a major health issue in the U.S., with about 805,000 people a year experiencing them — the equivalent of one every 40 seconds. About 12 percent of people who experience a heart attack will die from it.“Preventing heart f ...read more

It sounds like a setup for a horror movie: a meat-eating, cannibalistic caterpillar hiding in the shadows of a spiderweb and dressed in the remains of its former prey. But this incredible species, dubbed the “bone collector” and previously unknown to biologists, is real and living in a small section of forest on the Hawai'ian island of O’ahu.For the research team from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, this extremely rare discovery was 20 years in the making and shocked everyone involv ...read more

During the Apollo missions, astronauts faced challenges from sharp, fine particles of lunar dust that clung to nearly everything, posing potential health risks while causing instrument malfunctions and allergy-like symptoms. As the space sector prepares for future Mars missions, astronauts and researchers are investigating how Mars dust may impact astronauts and their equipment. Mars, the Toxic Beach Justin Wang, a medical student at the University of Southern California, has a background in p ...read more

There’s a lot that goes on inside our brains. But there are times that our minds go… well… what’s the word? Blank? Reviewing available research on mind blanking, a new article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences says that the moments in which we are “thinking about nothing” are actually a lot more complex than we might think, as they tend to correspond with physiological, neural, and cognitive changes in our brains and bodies. Taken as a whole, the new article suggests that the blanking ...read more

Meteorites carry clues that are pivotal in exploring the history of our Solar System, yet they don’t all look the same after impact. Colliding with a planetary surface sends shockwaves through meteorites, changing their configuration in various ways. Scientists noticed, though, that meteorites containing carbon often appear as if they experienced less intense impacts and look less “shocked” than meteorites without carbon. A new study has discovered that this is because evidence from these ...read more

When it comes to bonobo hierarchy, the ladies stick together. New research out of the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior finds that female bonobos team up to keep male bonobos in line, even though the males are larger and stronger than the females. This type of social structure is uncommon among social mammals in the animal kingdom, and researchers now have a better understanding of why, according to a new study published in Communications Biology. Bonobos: Queens of the JungleAccording ...read more

It can be difficult to understand quantum mechanics. That’s okay, because, in the early days of the Internet, few could understand how that worked. Now, new developments in quantum communication may turbocharge just how quickly and securely information is delivered among us. Scientists demonstrated that such a system could work on our existing telecommunications infrastructure, they report in the journal Nature Communication.This is kind of a big deal, because many physicists had thought that ...read more