Most tropical lightning storms are akin to massive pots of boiling water — but emitting bursts of gamma radiation instead of steam, according to reports in Nature. Those bursts also occur more frequently and in more forms than previously thought.Scientists first detected high-energy gamma-ray bursts in Earth’s atmosphere in the 1990s. NASA launched satellites to see high-energy particles from objects in space, like supernovas. The satellites caught signs of the radioactive supercharged parti ...read more

Rabies is a deadly disease. Without vaccination, a rabies infection is nearly 100% fatal once someone develops symptoms. Texas has experienced two rabies epidemics in animals since 1988: one involving coyotes and dogs in south Texas and the other involving gray foxes in west-central Texas. Affecting 74 counties, these outbreaks led to thousands of people who could have been exposed, two human deaths, and countless animal lives lost.In 1994, Gov. Ann Richards declared rabies a state health emerge ...read more

When Walt Whitman wrote that he contains “multitudes,” he was probably referring to personal potential. But the 19th-century American poet may just as well have been referring to cells. Cells are both the smallest biological unit that can survive on their own, as well as the building blocks that construct all living organisms. They contain instructions that can produce over 200 different types — each with their own function. Those instructions contain rules about what kind of cells they ca ...read more

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, civilization has been powered mostly by fossil fuels. But what sources of energy did ancient civilizations use, and how sustainable were those?How Ancient Civilizations Harnessed Solar EnergyThe most ubiquitous and renewable source of energy is, of course, the sun. People have long used solar energy — and not just for growing crops. According to Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy by John Perlin, excavations of Neolithic Chinese villages sho ...read more

If breaking a mirror actually brought bad luck, surely the government would have public service announcements regarding reflecting-glass safety. And if tossing salt over the left shoulder after spilling a shaker was truly effective, schools would host regular drills.Superstitions don’t make sense. Yet, many logical people wince if they break a mirror. They avoid the number 13 or hold their breath when passing cemeteries.Social scientists are learning more about the psychology behind superstiti ...read more

We’ve known for some time now that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, also known as archaic humans, interbred before Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago. In fact, in some ways, Neanderthals never went extinct because modern humans are still made up of around 3 percent Neanderthal DNA.But many questions still linger around where these two groups got together and what their interbreeding might have looked like.Previous research has highlighted a key migration point for H. sapiens after ...read more

Sometimes, resemblances between parent and child or siblings can be uncanny. Other times, such resemblances can pop up between aunt and niece or grandfather and grandchild. And still, other times, resemblances don’t exist at all.One child may look like one parent, and their sibling may look like the other parent. Sometimes, certain facial traits seem to jump from one generation to the next repeatedly.All of these outcomes lead us to wonder what impacts facial features. What part of our DNA is ...read more

Humans derive their sense of taste from tastebuds, which allow us to identify bitter, salty, sour, and sweet. In 1990, umami was identified as the fifth taste. Many animals also get their sense of taste through tastebuds, although there are other methods in the animal kingdom for identifying taste. Let’s take a look. What Animals Have the Best and Worst Sense of Taste?(Credit: MEDIAIMAG/Shutterstock)The animal with the best sense of taste is the catfish. Possessing over 100,000 (and in some c ...read more

Many fish owners have tapped on their aquarium and hoped little Bubbles was merely taking a nap inside the tiny castle.It can be difficult to determine whether a fish is sleeping, and even scientists have struggled to understand the sleep process of fish in the past.In recent years, technology has made it possible for researchers to scan fish brains and learn how they snooze.Do Fish Sleep?“Fish sleep, but not the same as humans or mammals,” says Jared Guthridge, the aquarium curator at the A ...read more

One of the curious features of the laws of physics is that many of them seem to be the result of the bulk behavior of many much smaller components. The atoms and molecules in a gas, for example, move at a huge range of velocities. When constrained in a container, these particles continually strike the surface creating a force. But it is not necessary to know the velocities of all the particles to determine this force. Instead, their influence averages out into a predictable and measurable bulk p ...read more