Aquatic animals delivered a one-two predatory punch millions of years ago. A combination of different teeth marks on “sea cow” bones show that a crocodile snatched the creature’s skull and drowned it with a “death roll”— essentially rotating underwater while grasping the sea cow in its jaws. When the croc was done dining, sharks showed up to finish the leftovers. The study, in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, provides a rare example of a creature being attacked by two differen ...read more

Rapamycin has been called a potential miracle drug, capable of slowing the effects of aging — everything from greying hair to age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s. And even though the bacteria that produces rapamycin was discovered about six decades ago, the drug still isn’t used or prescribed often. In the early phases of testing, experts discovered many side effects.“We’re the dog that caught the car — nobody seems to know what to do,” says Arlan Richardson, a biochemist at the ...read more

Imagine you are in a soccer match, and it’s tied. Each team will begin taking penalty kicks. The crowd is roaring, and whether or not your team wins the game depends on your ability to hit the shot. As you imagine this scene, are you able to picture the scenario with colors and details?Scientists are hard at worktrying to understand why some people can visualize these kinds of scenarios more easily than others can. Even the same person can be better or worse at picturing things in their mind a ...read more

As humans alter the planet’s climate and ecosystems, scientists are looking to Earth’s history to help predict what may unfold from climate change. To this end, massive ice structures like glaciers serve as nature’s freezers, archiving detailed records of past climates and ecosystems – including viruses.We are a team of microbiologists and paleoclimatologists who study ancient microorganisms, including viruses preserved within glacier ice. Along with our colleagues Lonnie Thompson, and V ...read more

As the summer wraps up, it is also time to wrap up my tour of the Cascade Range volcanoes as seen from space. The modern Cascades extend into Northern California and is the home of likely the largest volcano of the chain ... but the Earth's plates are plotting the end of the Cascades, starting from California.The ocean plates that spawn the magma that forms the Cascade volcanoes are young and small. The Juan de Fuca plate is responsible for the volcanoes from Oregon to British Columbia (save for ...read more

About one-third of the global population, around 3 billion people, don’t have access to the internet or have poor connections because of infrastructure limitations, economic disparities, and geographic isolation.Today’s satellites and ground-based networks leave communications gaps where, because of geography, setting up traditional ground-based communications equipment would be too expensive.High-altitude platform stations – telecommunications equipment positioned high in the air, on uncr ...read more

When you look at a crocodile, it’s easy to feel like you’re staring into the distant past. These ancient-looking reptiles, with their scaly skin and fearsome teeth, seem like living fossils — creatures frozen in time, unchanged for millions of years.But despite their prehistoric appearance, animals like crocodiles are not truly evolutionary relics. In fact, they’ve been evolving all along, just not in ways that are immediately obvious.The Illusion of Living FossilsThe concept of living f ...read more

If you’ve been tuning into the recent news, perhaps you’re aware that NASA recently made the difficult decision to delay bringing astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) home on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. The reason? Safety concerns. The spacecraft encountered several technical issues that teams on the ground simply couldn’t overlook. As a result, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been instructed to remain in orbit – at least until a pod from SpaceX, a long ...read more

One of the great endeavors of modern science is to understand the brain. This organ, the most complex machine we know, is a miracle of evolutionary biology. It processes a potent firehose of information to set goals, achieve tasks and navigate complex environments, often in ways that put the world’s most powerful supercomputers to shame. Remarkably, it weighs about the same as a bag of flour and runs on little more than a bowl of porridge.And yet, at the heart of this amazing capability is a p ...read more

It’s an old platitude and hoary chestnut: Life is all about balance.But sometimes we can find wisdom in even the most tired cliches. Balance is especially true in terms of managing your body’s intake of its two most abundant minerals: phosphorus and calcium.Although they each have specific functions, they work together to build and maintain strong bones and teeth. And each mineral’s efficacy depends on the amount of the other. Too much phosphorus or not enough calcium in your diet can incr ...read more