Oh, otters. The adorable weasel-puppies of the water. They famously hold paws while they’re sleeping so they don’t drift apart, which is about as cute as you can get. But these little marine mammals are also quite crafty. They’re often observed cracking open a tasty meal of mussels, crab or clams with the help of rocks. And a new paper out today in Scientific Reports says otters’ handy use of rocks can leave an archeological record.
There are a few ways otters get to th ...read more
More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today, each with unique words and phrases. But linguists have usually assumed that the sonic palette humans have used to produce these languages hasn't changed much over time
But a new study, published today in the journal Science, suggests otherwise. After analyzing languages from across the globe, a team of researchers found that sounds like “v” and “f” are relatively new, emerging just a few thousand years ago ...read more
At geological time scales, what really controls the climate isn't the atmosphere, it's the ground. Most of Earth's carbon dioxide is held underground, in reservoirs of natural gas and oil, but also in the rocks themselves. As the planet's tectonic plates slide and churn against one another, they bury carbon deep beneath the surface while exposing fresh rock that will soak up more carbon over time.
That carbon can be liberated in large volcanic events, causing mass extinctions. But the pro ...read more
No form of birth control is 100 percent effective. Now, a new study provides an explanation for why a small number of women who use hormonal contraceptive methods still become pregnant, even if they use them correctly.
A new study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology explains that some women have an uncommon genetic difference that makes hormonal contraception less effective for them.
In the paper, researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine say that ...read more
For years, NASA has been working on their massive Space Launch System (SLS), a next-generation heavy lift rocket that could launch cargo and astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo Program. They've been developing it in tandem with Orion, a crew capsule that would carry those astronauts into Earth orbit and beyond.
Orion’s next big test flight, called EM-1, an uncrewed mission into lunar orbit, is currently scheduled for June 2020. But in ...read more
The Milky Way Galaxy contains billions of stars. Though the vast majority of these are bound to the galaxy by gravity, astronomers have found a few tens of stars that are not orbiting but instead fleeing our galaxy at extreme speeds. These hypervelocity stars have intrigued researchers for years, and now a new mysterious player has entered the game. LAMOST-HVS, the closest of these fast-moving stars to our sun, has an origin story markedly different from the way we believed these stars get t ...read more
Last June, space exploration enthusiasts from across the world collectively held their breath as a global dust storm enveloped Mars. They did so not because our view of the Red Planet's surface was obscured, but instead because a go-kart-sized rover named Opportunity, which had been roaming the Red Planet for nearly 15 years, fell silent as the storm intensified. After eight months of fruitless attempts to resurrect "Oppy," which was only slated for a mission lasting 90 days, on February 13, ...read more
Three new crewmembers will join the International Space Station this week, launching today in a Soyuz vessel from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:14 p.m. EDT. The two NASA astronauts, Nick Hague and Christina Koch, will fly with Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin on a Soyuz spacecraft and dock with ISS after a six-hour flight. They will join NASA’s Anne McClain, Roscosmos’ Oleg Kononenko, and the Canadian Space Agency’s David Saint-Jacques, who have been in space since De ...read more
