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

Up until recently, humans have been known as the only species to surgically remove limbs to increase a wounded individual’s chances of survival. Chimps have medically treated injuries of the wounded, ants have carried inebriated nest mates home to sleep it off — but selectively amputating limbs to save the life of another is distinctly a human behavior.But Erik Frank, a biologist at the University of Würzburg, recently discovered that when the leg of a Camponotus floridanus ant was injured, ...read more

Judging only by the blistering summer sun, you’d be forgiven for assuming that space is a hothouse. But despite the tremendous energy pouring out of trillions and trillions of stars, our universe is surprisingly arctic.To understand why, we first need to wrap our heads around temperature because its true nature isn’t obvious when you burn your hand on the stove or dive into an icy lake. When scientists talk about hot and cold, they’re referring to the average kinetic energy of a system (wh ...read more

If you were to conjure up the strangest, hodge-podge creation of a bird in your mind, it would likely not be nearly as strange as the hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazi), a species native to the Amazon rainforest that is also known as the stink bird or the flying cow.That altogether unflattering name is apt, as this bird is renowned for the stench it leaves behind. What exactly makes the hoatzin so stinky is its unique digestive system. As its diet is almost exclusively made up of leaves, the hoatzin h ...read more

For decades, it was thought that the cause of death of the child from Cerro El Plomo was hypothermia. The naturally freeze-dried body of a child from 560 years ago – approximately 8 years old – is now considered one of the most important anthropological artifacts in Chile and a testament to the Inca Empire.He was found with his arms crossed around his legs and his head resting on his right shoulder and arm, as if he had fallen asleep that way. Researchers believed that he had consumed corn c ...read more

You’ve probably heard that it’s extremely difficult for adults to learn a second language. You may even have proof: You tried it yourself, and it didn’t work. But maybe that’s because you took the wrong approach.Stephen Krashen has a better idea. In the 1980s, Krashen, now professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, developed the Comprehensible Input Theory of language acquisition. The word acquisition, as opposed to learning, is key. Learning is what you did in school: ...read more

As intense heat breaks records around the world, a little-reported fact offers some hope for cooling down cities: Under even the most intense periods of extreme heat, some city blocks never experience heat wave temperatures.How is this possible?Civilizations have recognized the power of cities to heat themselves up and cool themselves for centuries. City architects in ancient Rome called for narrowing streets to lessen late afternoon temperatures. Narrow streets were found to cool the air by lim ...read more

Did you know that the bananas you eat today are not the same typeas the ones people were eating a few generations ago? The banana you might have had with your breakfast today is a variety called the Cavendish banana, while the one that was in grocery stores up to the 1950s was a variety called Gros Michel, which was wiped out by a disease called Fusarium wilt of banana, or FWB.FWB of Gros Michel was caused by Fusarium oxysporum race 1, a fungal pathogen that affects bananas. This fungal infectio ...read more