Since January, China's Chang’e-4 mission – an orbiter and a rover – has been exploring the far side of the moon, particularly the prized South Pole-Aitken Basin, an asteroid impact crater that stretches across nearly a quarter of the moon’s surface. It's the biggest crater on the moon, as well as the deepest and the oldest. That's long left scientists suspecting that Aitken may hold vital clues as to how the moon – and many other solar system bodies & ...read more
I am always amazed how much we are still discovering about massive volcanic eruptions that happened as little as a few thousand years ago. Geologically speaking, that is something that happened yesterday, yet even that small slice of time can obscure some giant volcanic events that could have produced a global impact.
Two recent studies have improved our understanding of two truly enormous eruptions that happened in Central and South America. One, only 1,500 years ago, may have produced o ...read more
Store-bought tomatoes taste horrifically disgusting — err, bland. Now scientists have discovered a version of a gene that helps give tomatoes their flavor is actually missing in about 93 percent of modern, domesticated varieties. The discovery may help bring flavor back to tomatoes you can pick up in the produce section.
"How many times do you hear someone say that tomatoes from the store just don't quite measure up to heirloom varieties?" Clifford Weil, program director of the National S ...read more
A new analysis of Apollo-era quakes on the moon reveal that our satellite is probably still tectonically active. Detectors laid down by Apollo astronauts half a century ago revealed small shakes on the moon, but their causes weren’t well understood. Meteor strikes, like those that caused the moon’s most distinctive features, still rain down today, so astronomers couldn’t be sure whether the moon was shaking itself, or being shaken by external forces.
Now, new researc ...read more
Amber, being fossilized tree resin, usually preserves scenes from an ancient forest. The latest stunning find from Myanmar, however, is a souvenir from a day at the beach 99 million years ago, including the first ammonite, a marine animal, preserved in amber.
The piece of amber is small — about the size of a standard pair of dice, and less than a quarter of an ounce — but it's jam-packed with animals that tell an intriguing story about its journey from tree trunk to fossil bed. ...read more
Apollo 10 doesn’t get much attention. On the rare occasion people talk about the mission right before the first lunar landing, it’s lumped into the “pre-Apollo 11” category and dismissed as one of the stepping stones on the bridge to the Moon. But it was far more interesting than just a mission that preceded Apollo 11.
My latest appearance on CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks was all about Apollo 10, but first, a little background on the mission.
In October of ...read more
A paper in PNAS got some attention on Twitter recently. It's called Childhood trauma history is linked to abnormal brain connectivity in major depression and in it, the authors Yu et al. report finding (as per the Significance Statement)
A dramatic primary association of brain resting-state network (RSN) connectivity abnormalities with a history of childhood trauma in major depressive disorder (MDD).
The authors go on to note that even though "the brain imaging took place decades after trauma ...read more
In the dim light of dusk, the world appears gray. That's because we, like most vertebrates, have just on type of rod opsin, the light-sensitive pigment in our eyes that lets us see in low light. During the day, a different set of pigments in cone cells pick up a broader range of wavelengths, giving us color vision.
Now, an international team of researchers has discovered that fish living in the dark depths of the oceans nearly a mile below the surface may use rod opsins — which grant ...read more
