The Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia is one of the most active volcanic areas on Earth. It isn't surprising to find multiple volcanoes erupting each week and this week is no exception. Two side-by-side volcanoes -- Bezymianny and Sheveluch -- were simultaneously erupting over the weekend (above). The eruption at Bezymianny was big enough to cause some air travel over the peninsula to divert flight paths to avoid the ash, but that's business-as-usual in Kamchatka.
Kamchtka is ...read more
CBD, or cannabidiol, has exploded onto the market in recent years. Sometime in the past decade, this purportedly medicinal marijuana extract went from being an obscure stoner oil to the wellness product du jour, flooding from holistic markets to the mainstream. Analysts at the investment bank Cowen Inc. predict the industry will balloon to $16 billion by 2025. In comparison, CBD sales totaled less than $1 billion last year, though that’s no small feat for a field that didn’ ...read more
On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons probe streaked by a tiny world dubbed MU69, or Ultima Thule, the farthest object humankind has studied up close. With most of the data still on the spacecraft waiting to be transmitted, scientists are still getting to know this distant body. We know that it's composed of two chunks of rock loosely stuck together. We know that it doesn't have moons or rings that New Horizons might have careened into on its close pass. And we kno ...read more
Do human beings have a magnetic sense? Biologists know other animals do. They think it helps creatures including bees, turtles and birds navigate through the world.
Scientists have tried to investigate whether humans belong on the list of magnetically sensitive organisms. For decades, there’s been a back-and-forth between positive reports and failures to demonstrate the trait in people, with seemingly endless controversy.
The mixed results in people may be due to the fact that virt ...read more
I just came across a paper with an interesting title: The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”.
The conclusions of this work are even more interesting. According to the authors, Edward Dutton et al., humans evolved to be religious and atheism is caused (in part) by mutational damage to our normal, religious DNA. Atheists, in other words, are genetic degenerates.
Despite the talk of mutations, there is no genetics in this paper. No atheist genomes were sequenced and found ...read more
Last month, NASA's Mars InSight lander started digging into the Red Planet. Its HP3 (Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package) instrument was designed to burrow and measure Mars from underground, uncovering new geological evidence about how heat flows through the Martian soil. The part of this instrument that actually burrows into the ground is known as the mole. It was meant to penetrate up to 16 feet deep. But it stopped just hours after it starting digging. The ...read more
Over the last half century, spacecraft have visited every planet and their major moons, as well as two dwarf planets and more than a dozen asteroids and comets. Thanks to high-res images, we know these worlds intimately and can appreciate what makes each of them unique. These days, fewer than 3 in 10 Americans are old enough to recall a time when our neighboring worlds were indistinct dots in even the most powerful telescopes.
And yet, even before there were spacecraft to show us, in the ...read more
Age 116, Kane Tanaka of Japan was recently crowned the oldest person on Earth. She’s six years shy of the longest human life on record: 122 years and 164 days reached by a French woman, Jeanne Louise Calment, before her death in 1997.
While turning 100 can get you a shout out on the Today show, there’s nothing newsworthy about surviving into your 70s. That’s just expected based on life expectancy. In the United States, on average, newborn males live to 76 years and female ...read more
Have you ever wished for eyes in the back of your head? How about your rear end?
Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia have been studying “seeing” tails among several species of Australian sea snakes. That includes the olive sea snake, Aipysurus laevis, pictured here.
Their long tails make a tempting target for predators, but evolution has endowed at least three species of these sea snakes with a neat trick: the skin on their tails can sense light.
The scientists ...read more
After more than 60 years, McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s main research center, is set to begin its first major infrastructure update. In February, the National Science Foundation got the green light to start construction on the so-called Antarctica Infrastructure Modernization for Science, or AIMS, project.
As first reported by Antarctic Sun, the continent's NSF-funded newspaper, the project will consolidate the sprawling research station’s some 100 buildings into just six prima ...read more
