Southern California is famous for its sandy beaches, wine country, theme parks and Hollywood glitz. And also its earthquakes. Now, researchers have identified more than 1.8 million previously unknown earthquakes that hit Southern California between 2008 and 2017. The findings suggest these truly tiny earthquakes — as small as just 0.3 magnitude on the Richter scale — happen every 174 seconds, yet they're hardly felt on Earth's surface. “The goal was to prod ...read more

Oh, to be a synesthete, those rare people with access to an extra layer of perception. Sounds have colors. Words have taste. Colors play music. The list goes on. The phenomenon isn't totally understood by scientists, but the general idea is that those with synesthesia experience sensory inputs differently than the rest of us. It's no wonder that synesthesia is common among artists. But for those of us that just see letters as letters and can't taste a song ...read more

On August 13, 2017, the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescope spotted an intense solar flare from a tiny star barely bigger than Jupiter. But despite this sun's diminutive size, the flare gave off as much energy as 80 billion megatons of TNT. That's 10 times as powerful as the strongest flare ever observed on our own sun. It’s also the coolest star ever observed to give off such a hot flare, and the spectacular outburst is teaching astronomers the power of small stars. Light it U ...read more

As alarm grew over autism prevalence at the turn of this century, there was much public talk of a growing “epidemic.” That language has since softened, and it is now clear that many autistic people were there all along, their condition unrecognized until relatively recently. But what is the cause? The emerging narrative today is that there is no single cause — rather, multiple factors, roughly sorted into the categories of genetics and environment, work together in complex way ...read more

Don’t you just hate it when a moth larva busts in through the wall of your house like some squirmy lepidopteran Kool-Aid man? If you’re a colony of aphids living in a gall, this is a real threat. But luckily there’s a team of heroes ready to spring to action, even sacrifice themselves, to repair that wall and save the rest of the clan. A team of Japanese researchers has been studying this phenomenon for over 15 years. Their latest work, out this week in PNAS, breaks down the i ...read more

Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what's now Kenya and you've got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. The enormous bitey mammal was identified only after researchers rediscovered partial fossils of it, forgotten in the backroom of a museum. To be clear, Simbakubwa is neither a bear nor a member of the extended feline family, even though its name is Swahili for "big lion." Instead, the mas ...read more

Our solar system is a whopping 4.5 billion years old. And those earliest days were some of the most interesting for astronomers. That's when the planets formed, building from dust grains into the whole worlds that now populate our space neighborhood. But most of this material has been drastically changed since its early days – incorporated into planets, or baked by the sun and weathered by time. However, if we could find material that hasn’t been ch ...read more

Researchers say they've rebooted pigs’ brains four hours after the animals died. The scientists managed to restore some blood flow and brain cell activity to the dead animals' brains by pumping a protective solution through the tissue using a proprietary technology they call BrainEx. The brain was never alert and researchers did not restore consciousness, but the work could lead to new ways to aid recovery after trauma like heart attacks and strokes, the researchers say ...read more

Toothy tyrannosaurs and enormous titanosaurs may be the most dramatic dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous, but plant-eating hadrosaurs had the numbers. These widely-distributed animals, often called duck-billed dinosaurs, are among the most commonly found fossils from the period that stretched 66 million-100 million years ago. Yet the hadrosaur origin story remains a bit of a mystery. Today, a magnificent new find from Mongolia fills in some of the gaps. Paleontologists unearthed m ...read more

During the last centuries of China’s Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon, rich and varied in its manifestations. Rulers and elites sacrificed animals and humans to appease spirits or the ancestors. Just as humans met their ends, dogs were often right beside them. Now a study in Archaeological Research in Asia, published in March, shows that people from the Shang dynasty relied heavily on sacrificial puppies to acco ...read more