This composite image of the cloud-covered planet Venus uses data from the Japanese probe Akatsuki. (Credit: Institute of Space and Astronautical Science/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Something mysterious swirls amidst the clouds of Venus. The planet’s hot, harsh atmosphere is thick with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Atmospheric gases circulate amid cloud layers according to patterns that scientists don’t fully understand. And Venusian clouds also contain strange, dark ...read more

The robot snake in a model of human veins. (Credit: Kim et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaax7329 (2019)) You probably didn’t picture the robots of the future to be slimy, magnetized snakes. But a hyper-flexible robot modeled after the legless reptiles and designed by researchers at MIT could make it easier to diagnose and treat blood clots, aneurysms and perform other small-scale procedures in the brain. The device, less than a millimeter thick, was designed to crawl through the narrow, twis ...read more

Mimosa plants have long inspired intrigue with their ability to move when touched. (Credit: Discover/Stipple engraving by R. Earlom, 1789, after G. Romney. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY) When The Secret Life of Plants came out in 1973, Lincoln Taiz was a graduate student, just embarking on what would become a many-decades long career in plant biology. Plants, the book revealed, can make their own trace elements through fusion, just like the sun. More, they can recognize people. If someo ...read more

At 3.8 million years old, this mostly complete cranium of Australopithecus amanensis is the oldest australopith skull in the fossil record. (Credit: Dale Omori, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History) On Feb. 10, 2016, the face of a ghost emerged from weathered Ethiopian sandstone. The nearly complete skull, 3.8 million years old, was found less than 20 miles from the site where Lucy, the most famous of our distant evolutionary relatives, was discovered in the 1970s. Lucy was ...read more

Gas glows white, lit by a stellar nursery, in this view of a region within the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy. Most cosmic gas is not so visible and lies outside of galaxies — in halos surrounding galaxies and in the vast spaces in between. Yet the gas determines galactic life cycles. (Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA) Most of what astronomers know about the universe comes from what they can see. So their ideas have been prejudiced toward stars and g ...read more

An albino lizard hatchling, one of the first to be gene edited with CRISPR. (Doug Menke) Skittering among the Caribbean flora are anole lizards, tiny reptiles no bigger than a finger’s length. Sporting shades of grey, brown and green, island life has spurred the evolution of some 150 species there. As a result, anole lizards have become a key scientific model for research into how reptiles develop and evolve. But scientists have been missing a critical element: the tools to investig ...read more

USGS geologist measuring the temperature of a fissure prior to the 2018 eruption at Kīlauea in Hawaii. USGS/HVO. So, first off, I apologize for the clickbait headline, but don't worry, there actually is a payoff here. What I'm going to say is 100% true. Geology isn't just a pile of rocks, no matter what you might think. Sure, there are rocks involved ... but "geo" doesn't mean rocks. It means Earth, so when we talk about geology, we're talking about the our planet -- and our planet is mo ...read more

The SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule approaches the International Space Station on July 27, 2019. (Credit: NASA) A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft will return to Earth on August 27, bringing back experiments from the International Space Station (ISS), including investigations into how moss grows in space. The capsule originally launched July 25 from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, taking two days to reach the ISS. It successfully completed its cargo resupply mission and has been do ...read more

(Credit: Ruchira Somaweera) (Inside Science) -- Extinction wiped out their closest family members as well as most of the ancient reptiles of comparable size. But the largest lizards still on the planet, the Komodo dragon, survived due to a lucky combination of mediocre habitat on their home islands and unintended human interventions. “You would have thought the Komodo would have been wiped out, and yet it survived,” said Rick Shine, a biologist at Macquarie University in Sydn ...read more

(Credit: Elnur/Shutterstock) Want to live forever? Or at least well into old age? Results from a new study suggest optimism might be part of the equation. A large-scale study indicates those with a bright outlook on life lived as much as 10 percent longer, and stood a better chance of making it past 85. "This study ... suggests that optimism is one such psychosocial asset that has the potential to extend the human lifespan,” Boston University School of Medicine clinical research psyc ...read more