(Credit: Lizard/Shutterstock) Crack open an oyster shell and the inner face shimmers in a rainbow of kaleidoscopic colors. This smooth material, known as mother-of-pearl, is beautiful and resilient – so resilient that it has inspired the creation of virtually shatterproof glass. “Our bioinspired glass is 2-3 times more impact resistant than laminated glass and tempered glass -- the 'standards' for impact-resistant transparent materials,” says McGill University engineer F ...read more

(Credit: meyer_solutions/Shutterstock) Deepfake videos are hard for untrained eyes to detect because they can be quite realistic. Whether used as personal weapons of revenge, to manipulate financial markets or to destabilize international relations, videos depicting people doing and saying things they never did or said are a fundamental threat to the longstanding idea that “seeing is believing.” Not anymore. Most deepfakes are made by showing a computer algorithm many images of ...read more

Airplane contrails, also known as the ice clouds formed by airplane farts, could contribute substantially to climate change. This will be accentuated in the future as air travel ramps up. (Credit: Gajus/Shutterstock) More than 40,000 airplanes crisscross the skies above the U.S. every day. The engines propelling the metal birds through the wild blue yonder leave behind distinct line-shaped clouds known as contrails. The wispy clouds form when water vapor from fuel combustion condenses and cr ...read more

Imagine a smoldering hot day in downtown Boston: temperatures have reached over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sidewalks and streets are absorbing the strong heat from the sun and radiating it back into the air. Days like this are becoming hotter and more frequent. This “silent storm” causes more deaths in the US than all other weather hazards combined. Heat impacts human health, infrastructure, and the environment. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect Urban areas trap heat insi ...read more

Dragonfly, with its eight rotors, will explore Saturn's moon Titan by flight, the first for an off-world mission. (Credit: Johns Hopkins APL) Today, NASA announced the next mission in their New Frontiers program to explore the solar system. Dragonfly, a drone lander, will explore Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Titan is the only solar system moon with an extensive atmosphere and standing bodies of liquid on its surface. The moon is also filled with organic materials, and is thought to ...read more

(Credit: Fh Photo/ Shutterstock) Eating is one of the great pleasures of living. And knowing when to stop, a wonderful virtue. For some people, the decision to stop doesn’t come easy. And can we blame them? Eating is awesome! But there comes a point where never feeling full turns into a problem — a heavy problem. There are many health risks associated with overeating. From increased risk of heart disease to diabetes, cancer and a myriad of other diseases, overeating is simply ...read more

(Credit: AlexLMX/Shutterstock) If you’re a TV junkie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Chernobyl, HBO’s show about the 1986 nuclear disaster of the same name. It shows, in horrifying detail, how the meltdown and explosion of part of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant spewed massive amounts of radiation from radioactive elements and isotopes into the atmosphere. How that radiation poisoned first responders and citizens of the nearby cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl. How, ...read more

Meteorites are thought to have delivered many of the materials necessary for life, which might even include deadly cyanide. (Credit: NASA's GSFC Conceptual Image Lab) Science is still uncertain as to how exactly life first arose. While experiments with electricity and simple ingredients can make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and the framework for all living things as we know them, how to make the jump from lifeless chains of molecules to biological life is still unknown. S ...read more

The Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope is the first to pinpoint the source of a non-repeating Fast Radio Burst. (Credit: CSIRO/Andrew Howells) Fast Radio Bursts are one of space’s great mysteries. Discovered for the first time only in 2007, they are massively powerful bursts of radio waves that last for just a fraction of a second. The vast majority of these signals occur once, and then never happen again – making them especially hard to track and study. Scientists know tha ...read more

This American alligator, like crocodiles and other related species, is a meat-eating power biter. (Credit: US Fish & Wildlife Service) Someone says "crocodiles" and the image that comes to mind is probably a toothy one. Modern crocodilians are power biters, and many species are apex predators. But it wasn't always that way. Paleontologists believe that multiple extinct species preferred plants over prey. Toothfully Speaking Humans, like most mammals, are heterodonts: We have ...read more