(Credit: Fh Photo/ Shutterstock)
Eating is one of the great pleasures of living. And knowing when to stop, a wonderful virtue. For some people, the decision to stop doesn’t come easy. And can we blame them? Eating is awesome! But there comes a point where never feeling full turns into a problem — a heavy problem.
There are many health risks associated with overeating. From increased risk of heart disease to diabetes, cancer and a myriad of other diseases, overeating is simply ...read more
(Credit: AlexLMX/Shutterstock)
If you’re a TV junkie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Chernobyl, HBO’s show about the 1986 nuclear disaster of the same name. It shows, in horrifying detail, how the meltdown and explosion of part of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant spewed massive amounts of radiation from radioactive elements and isotopes into the atmosphere. How that radiation poisoned first responders and citizens of the nearby cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl. How, ...read more
Meteorites are thought to have delivered many of the materials necessary for life, which might even include deadly cyanide. (Credit: NASA's GSFC Conceptual Image Lab)
Science is still uncertain as to how exactly life first arose. While experiments with electricity and simple ingredients can make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and the framework for all living things as we know them, how to make the jump from lifeless chains of molecules to biological life is still unknown.
S ...read more
The Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope is the first to pinpoint the source of a non-repeating Fast Radio Burst. (Credit: CSIRO/Andrew Howells)
Fast Radio Bursts are one of space’s great mysteries. Discovered for the first time only in 2007, they are massively powerful bursts of radio waves that last for just a fraction of a second. The vast majority of these signals occur once, and then never happen again – making them especially hard to track and study. Scientists know tha ...read more
This American alligator, like crocodiles and other related species, is a meat-eating power biter. (Credit: US Fish & Wildlife Service)
Someone says "crocodiles" and the image that comes to mind is probably a toothy one. Modern crocodilians are power biters, and many species are apex predators. But it wasn't always that way.
Paleontologists believe that multiple extinct species preferred plants over prey.
Toothfully Speaking
Humans, like most mammals, are heterodonts: We have ...read more
These two Hubble images show gravitationally lensed galaxies and their halos (pink), as well as the galaxy clusters (yellow) responsible for the lensing. Gravitational lensing often results in more than one image of a single galaxy (right), or sometimes smears that light out into a ring (left). (Credit: ESO/NASA/ESA/A. Claeyssens)
Galaxies are not just the glowing stars and gas you see through a telescope. They are swaddled in a huge ball, or “halo,” of hydrogen that stretches vas ...read more
Artist's rendering of the Black Sea big bird Pachystruthio, which researchers estimate was comparable to Madagascar's elephant birds and New Zealand's moa. (Credit: Andrey Atuchin)
Towering more than ten feet tall and weighing in at about 1,000 pounds, big bird Pachystruthio was a big deal. The animal, which weighed about as much as a male polar bear, roamed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. That's thousands of miles — and across the equator — from the better-known avian giants.
...read more
A study detected hidden consciousness in one out of seven unresponsive brain injury patients using widely-available hospital technology. (Credit: Chairoij/Shutterstock)
There are some things that life never prepares you for — like the dreaded phone call that a loved one is in a coma, and you’re responsible for making their end-of-life decisions if they don’t wake up. These decisions are further complicated by the fact that there’s no true test for consciousness. And, u ...read more
Lightning strikes are preceded by "glows" of gamma ray radiation, scientists find. (Credit: Breno Machado/Unsplash)
Summer in the U.S. brings big thunderstorms. Towering thunderhead clouds fill the skies and energy permeates the air as positive and negative electrical charges build up between the earth and the atmosphere. Lightning bolts reset the tension with a tremendous jolt of energy.
Now researchers discover glows of gamma rays – high-energy electromagnetic radiation – ap ...read more
The clump of gas ALMA spotted, about as long as the distance between the Sun and Jupiter, may one day become a fully-fledged planet. (Credit: ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, Tsukagoshi et al.)
Stars in the early stages of their lives are surrounded by flat disks of dust and gas, spinning slowly around them. Over time, this material clumps together to form planets, or eventually gets blown away by the stellar wind. This process can take millions of years, so astronomers don’t have a way to watch it ...read more
