In the science fiction film The Fly, a scientist accidentally transforms into a winged insect that ultimately destroys him. In a collection of science articles about the fly, a team of scientists this week unpacked the details of how the Drosophila melanogaster brain operates — paving the way for a better understanding of how the human mind turns senses into actions, processes thoughts, and, perhaps most mysterious of all, stores experiences as memories.The foundation of the publications in Na ...read more

Nostalgia, mixed with a bit of curiosity, can lead to some important insights.When Richard Karban, an ecology researcher at the University of California, Davis, decided to return to the forest he surveyed in 1977 — this time accompanied by his daughter Claire, a graduate student in ecology at the University of Colorado, Boulder — he expected to see little change. After all, when he first visited Whiteoak Canyon in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, he’d seen much the same tree composit ...read more

Most CubeSats weigh less than a bowling ball, and some are small enough to hold in your hand. But the impact these instruments are having on space exploration is gigantic. CubeSats – miniature, agile, and cheap satellites – are revolutionizing how scientists study the cosmos.A standard-size CubeSat is tiny, about 4 pounds (roughly 2 kilograms). Some are larger, maybe four times the standard size, but others weigh no more than a pound.As a professor of electrical and computer engineering who ...read more

In early 1991, several scientists went deep into the Siberian tundra on a covert mission. They worked for a secret laboratory funded by the Soviet government, and they needed a sample of variola major, the virus that causes smallpox.They headed to a cemetery from the 1800s reserved for smallpox victims and cut deep into the ice. They extracted several corpses still wrapped in caribou fur. The ice had preserved the bodies well, and the scientists took bone and tissue samples, hoping they still co ...read more

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