Earlier this month, we visited the Cascade Range volcanoes on British Columbia. Today we're hitting the volcanoes in Washington, including likely the most famous volcano (after Yellowstone) in the United States as well as a contender for the most powerful (known) eruption in the Cascades. All the images come from the Sentinel-2 Earth observing missions launched by the European Space Agency. This missions will become even more vital for monitoring the planet after NASA's Terra and Aqua satellite ...read more

It seemed like a good job at first. Starting in 1917, the United States Radium Corporation hired teenage girls and young women to work as painters. Using fine paintbrushes, the workers applied glow-in-the-dark paint onto watches and military instruments. The paint shone brightly because it contained radium, a substance that management assured the young workers was harmless.In the book The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, author Kate Moore detailed how the workers were t ...read more

You might have heard that our world is out of balance. Ecosystems that need native plants and animals to flourish are plagued by human development and invasive species. Many of our local green spaces like yards, parks, and porches are home to mostly introduced, non-native plants that do little to maintain a healthy regional biodiversity.Want to restore native biodiversity? It’s possible, and the solutions are within reach: try rewilding your community with native plants. Mary Reynolds created ...read more

Have you ever said “I hate you” to someone? What about using the “h-word” in casual conversation, like “I hate broccoli”? What are you really feeling when you say that you hate something or someone?The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word “hate” as an “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” All over the world, researchers like us are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psychology, so ...read more

Animals sporting elongated curved canine teeth have appeared twice in the fossil record, millions of years apart. One lineage, the nimravids, went extinct about in North America about 23 million years ago. Then the saber-toothed tiger vanished about 8,000 years to 10,000 years ago. More recently, saber teeth have also evolved in “true” cats of the Felidae family.Scientists have long wondered why saber teeth emerged over different times and places, vanished, then re-appeared. A new study in C ...read more

Sometimes one clue at a crime scene can provide the key to unlocking an entire mystery. Such is the case with a single gold earring found inside a building that burned to the ground about 2,200 years ago in Catalonia, according to a report in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.The fact that the earring was hidden — both in a pot and in a nook inside a wall — suggests that its owners knew Hannibal’s Carthaginian army was heading their way. Because the earring was in one of the several b ...read more

Many people understand the concept of bias at some intuitive level. In society, and in artificial intelligence systems, racial and gender biases are well documented.If society could somehow remove bias, would all problems go away? The late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who was a key figure in the field of behavioral economics, argued in his last book that bias is just one side of the coin. Errors in judgments can be attributed to two sources: bias and noise.Bias and noise both play important r ...read more

With the new Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black” in U.S. theaters as of May 17, 2024, the late singer’s relationship with alcohol and drugs is under scrutiny again. In July 2011, Winehouse was found dead in her flat in north London from “death by misadventure” at the age of 27. That’s the official British term used for accidental death caused by a voluntary risk.Her blood alcohol concentration was 0.416%, more than five times the legal intoxication limit in the U.S. – leading her ...read more

There’s an old saying that you can’t step in the same river twice. But a group of researchers have now retraced an ancient, buried Nile tributary — allowing historians to walk in the dried-up waterway path that probably proved instrumental in the construction of the 31 pyramids it once flowed past.A report in Communications Earth & Environment employed satellite imaging, ground-penetrating radar, and soil samples to show that these famous structures — including the Giza complex — m ...read more

Exoplanets, or planets far from our solar system, are always exciting to discover. With each one, researchers learn more about how these exoplanets form and whether they can support life and star systems across the universe. A team of researchers from various universities just identified another exoplanet about the same size as Earth, 55 light-years away, which is very close when compared to cosmic scales. The exoplanet, dubbed SPECULOOS-3 b, is only the second of its kind currently known and ta ...read more