It's easy to forget it, but much of the world is invisible to us. I don't mean that in the sense of things being really tiny, or in any metaphorical way. No, most of the world is literally invisible. That's because what we call visible light is actually a tiny sliver of the much greater electromagnetic spectrum. The rainbow we see sits in the middle of a vast continuum of wavelengths, including everything from high energy gamma and ultraviolet radiation to much lower infrared and radio wa ...read more

A 17th-century Russian nobleman named Butterlijn had a bone to pick with his surgeon. Butterlijn, the story goes, had been struck in the head with a sword, and his surgeon repaired the injury by transplanting a piece of dog bone into Butterlijn’s skull. He survived, only to be excommunicated by his church because he was deemed no longer fully human. Butterlijn demanded that the surgeon take the dog bone back out; when the surgeon tried, he found that Butterlijn’s skull had regrown ar ...read more

Everything old is new again in TV-land, as it so often is. Last week we learned that kids still watch more television than anything else, and this week a new study comes out confirming what many of us have long suspected: too much TV can rot your mind — if you're over 50. It’s like the 80s never left! Now, to be fair, it’s all couched in the careful language of science, so technically it’s a decline in verbal memory that is associated with watching a specific amount of T ...read more

A NASA rover deployed to Chile’s Atacama desert has discovered microbes in one of the most Mars-like environments on Earth. It could prove helpful in the search for life on Red Planet. The life that the rover found was adapted to extremely salty environments, much like those on Mars. Scientists also say the life was patchy, which they expected and called a basic rule of ecology. That's because nutrients and water tend to accumulate in pools. But finding that this also holds true in extrem ...read more

The last time Jim Murphy saw snow in Los Angeles, he was 11 years old. It was December, 1968 — a week or so before holiday break — and the already unruly class was stirred into a frenzy when one sixth grader spotted the flurries outside. “Of course, everyone ran out of the classroom,” Murphy recalls. “The teacher had no control.” Northridge, where Murphy grew up, is a neighborhood of Los Angeles that sits at about 800 feet above sea level. Snow is more comm ...read more

What color are these shells? The grove snail, Cepaea nemoralis, comes in a range of colors that can be roughly sorted into three groups: yellow, pink and brown. Tracking color has been key to studying the evolution of this snail, however new research published in the journal Heredity highlights differences in the way humans see color that can make categorization a bit trickier (remember The Dress?) “As scientists, to ensure the accuracy of our studies and the subsequent interpretat ...read more

Getting enough deep sleep might be the key to preventing dementia. In a series of recent experiments on mice, researchers discovered that deep sleep helps the brain clear out potentially toxic waste. The discovery reinforces how critical quality sleep is for brain health and suggests sleep therapies might curb the advance of memory-robbing ailments, like Alzheimer's disease. “Alzheimer’s disease is a major problem for the patients, their families and society,” said M ...read more

(Inside Science) -- Most of us are familiar with the screeching noise packing tape makes when it's peeled off a box, as well as the frustration of failing to cleanly remove a label from a new purchase. It turns out that the jerky stop-and-go motion we experience when peeling tape occurs at a microscopic level as well. Scientists exploring the physics of peeling tape have observed that tape detaches from a surface in a series of tiny lines perpendicular to the peeling direction that can tr ...read more

Troels Schönfeldt can trace his path to becoming a nuclear energy entrepreneur back to 2009, when he and other young physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen started getting together for an occasional “beer and nuclear” meetup. The beer was an India pale ale that they brewed themselves in an old, junk-filled lab space in the institute’s basement. The “nuclear” part was usually a bull session about their options for fighting two of humanity’s ...read more

If you find yourself getting used to strangely scorching or abnormally frigid temperatures, you might not be alone. After combing through over two billion tweets about the weather, a team of researchers found that people seem to get used to abnormal weather pretty quickly. They found that users were less likely to post about unusually high or low temperatures if the same weather conditions had been seen in the past few years.  Peoples’ idea of “normal” weat ...read more