From an evolutionary perspective, the point of life is to procreate and pass on genes. That’s why most animals keep reproducing until their deathbeds. Yet in humans, females tend to live for decades after they're no longer fertile. All around the world, women experience menopause at around age 50 and routinely continue living into their 70s or 80s. Few other primates ever live long enough to make it through menopause. The rare individuals that do are usually ...read more

One year ago, astronomers announced their surprise discovery a galaxy almost entirely devoid of dark matter. As the first galaxy ever found lacking the elusive substance — which is thought to account for 85 percent of the universe's mass — the news rippled through the astronomical community. This left some researchers delightfully intrigued, and others understandably skeptical. "If there's [only] one object, you always have a little voice in the back of your mind sayi ...read more

Researchers have independently confirmed, for the first time, the detection of methane on Mars. For fifteen years, various research groups have claimed to see traces of methane in Mars’ atmosphere. Intriguingly, these often appear as puffs of gas that appear and disappear over short timescales. Groups have hotly debated whether the methane might be evidence of life, or merely geologic processes. Other researchers have argued whether the methane truly exists at all, or if the detections are ...read more

Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey is one of many made using the famed Lincoln County Process, which takes its name from the area where Jack Daniel's was first made. (Credit: monticello/shutterstock) Champagne is only champagne if it’s made in its namesake region in France, Scotch is exclusively distilled and matured in Scotland, and a “bourbon” label is reserved for products from the United States. And there’s one variation on the bourbon recipe — Tennessee Whiskey & ...read more

I'm a longtime fan of cosmic disaster scenarios. Not because I'm particularly gloomy (according to my friends and family, I'm actually more of a goof), but because they are fabulous ways to illustrate the workings of the universe. They are also great for making you appreciate the delicate set of contingencies that allow us to exist right now, right here on Earth. I wrote one of the first Armageddon-science articles, entitled "20 Ways the World Could End," which was published for the 20 ...read more

But the stop-gap measure, now before Congress, includes a provision that some regard as a major step backward For the 40 million people who depend on water from the Colorado River Basin, including me, there’s no escaping this stark reality: Our thirst for water exceeds what’s actually available. That’s mostly because rising temperatures are sapping moisture from the environment even as demand for water resources in the region is going up. The result: a run on the banks &mda ...read more

Dickinson, Janis L. & Bonney, Rick. (eds). Citizen Science: Public Participation in Environmental Research. Cornell University Press, 2012. 279 pages. Paperback $US 29.95. Though it was published in 2012, Citizen Science: Public Participation in Environmental Research is relevant to our present moment. As discussions of environmental research increase in frequency and urgency, institutions at all levels will continue to raise questions about the public’s scientific liter ...read more

After a year of downtime to perform hardware upgrades, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is ready for action and will turn on its twin detectors, one in Washington state and the other in Louisiana, on April 1. This time, it will also be joined by the Virgo collaboration based out of Italy, and possibly also by the KAGRA detector in Japan later in the year. Combined with the hardware upgrades, scientists expect these updates to allow LIGO to spot more observations ...read more

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the most stunning naked-eye sights you can spot in the southern sky. Over the past few billion years, these two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way have been locked in a complex dance that has led to numerous interactions between them. And each time they get close, their gravitational forces disrupt the gas clouds within them, spawning the formation of thousands of new star clusters. Now, astron ...read more

The last and only time astronomers got a close look at Neptune’s moon Triton was in 1989, when Voyager 2 sped by, taking images of just one side of the moon. But that brief encounter revealed plumes of material shooting out from a world so distant and cold that any activity was immediately fascinating. Scientists now think the moon has an underground ocean. This makes it a prime target for finding potential alien life in a frozen zone of the solar system well outside the standard ...read more