Not getting enough sleep is tied to a host of health issues. (Credit: JimAK_Photo/Shutterstock)
Are you one of the roughly one-third of Americans who sleep less than seven hours each night? If so, I’ve got some bad news for you: you’re probably not getting enough Zs.
While you sleep, your body and brain undergo several important changes. Gradually, you get cooler. Your breathing and heart rate slow down. Chemicals that decrease your appetite are released so you don’t wake ...read more
The two white dwarf stars orbit so close together that the whole system could fit inside the planet Saturn. (Credit: Caltech/IPAC)
Astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Kitt Peak in Arizona have discovered the second fastest orbiting pair of white dwarfs. At the end of their normal lives, our sun and other stars like it become white dwarfs. Their outer layers puff away and leave behind a hot, dense core. And if those stars started life in a binary pair, as most stars do, then th ...read more
The lava lake at the summit of Shishaldin in Alaska, seen on July 23, 2019. Image by David Fee, UAFGI/AVO.
It has been over a year since a volcano in the United States was host to a lava lake. At the beginning of 2018, Hawaii's Kīlauea was home to one at the summit and one on the East Rift Zone at Pu'u O'o. However, when the lower Puna eruption struck last May, both lava lakes drained. Well, the wait is over for a new lava lake, this time in Alaska.
The Alaska Volcano Observatory repo ...read more
(Credit: SubstanceTproductions/Shutterstock)
Some five ounces of clear fluid fills the spaces between your brain and your skull. This brain juice, or cerebrospinal fluid, cushions against injury, supplies nutrients and clears away waste. Your body can make as much as a pint of fresh stuff every day to replace the old.
But for 150 years, scientists have puzzled over how the used cerebrospinal fluid leaves the brain to make room for more. New research, published Wednesday in Nature, has fin ...read more
Skaters enjoy a frozen canal in Rotterdam during the so-called Little Ice Age in Germany. A new analysis shows the temperature swings of the past 2,000 years were all regional in nature, unlike modern climate change. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Painting by Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove, Circa 1825)
Today's climate change is unlike any seen in the last 2,000 years, scientists report Wednesday in the journal Nature. New research shows that the civilization-altering warm and cold ...read more
Aspirin, commonly held to help heart health, also poses dangers for some people. (Credit: fizkes/Shutterstock)
Many Americans have seen the television commercials from a leading Aspirin manufacturer saying their drug “can help prevent another heart attack.” The claims behind the commercials, which have been airing for decades, are based on research showing that taking low doses of Aspirin daily can prohibit the aggregation of platelets that can cause a heart attack.
But Aspirin ...read more
A SpaceX Dragon cargo craft on a resupply mission to the ISS. (Credit: NASA)
Just days after the three newest crew members arrived on the
International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule is set to launch
on a resupply mission.
At about 6:24 p.m. EDT on July 24, a Falcon 9 rocket with
the attached Dragon capsule are scheduled to blast off from the Space Launch
Complex at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Dragon is supposed to reach the ISS
for docking on Friday.
On ...read more
The tiny spheres, evidence of a long-ago asteroid strike, are smaller than grains of salt. (Credit: Mike Meyer/Meteoritics and Planetary Science)
In 2006, an undergraduate student from the University of
South Florida named Mike Meyer spent his summer collecting fossils from the
walls of a quarry. In typical intern glory, his job was to pry open fossilized
clams and wash away sediment, looking for shells of long-dead single-celled
organisms.
Instead, he found what appeared to be miniscule ...read more
(Credit: fizkes/Shutterstock)
Hey, what do you call a sleeping dinosaur? A dino-SNORE!
What’s wrong, don’t find that funny? Well, what if I told you the exact same joke, but instead of crickets, uproarious laughter accompanied the punchline? According to a study today in Current Biology, you’d find it noticeably funnier.
The researchers found that even if the laughter is fake — posed, and not actual spontaneous laughter — it’d still boost your opini ...read more
With help from dark matter annihilation, some of the universe’s earliest stars were able to grow much larger than they would otherwise. (Credit: Astronomy/Roen Kelly after NSF)
Powered by dark matter, dark stars are hypothetical objects that may have inhabited the early universe. If they existed, these mysterious beasts would not only have been the first stars to form in the cosmos, they also might explain how supermassive black holes got their start.
Fueled by Dark Matter
(Cr ...read more
