A telephone ringing. A car horn blaring. Fluorescent lighting overhead. These are everyday sights and sounds that most people don’t give a second thought to. But for a person with autism, being around ordinary sensory stimuli can be uncomfortable or even unbearable. Autism, typically thought of as a disorder affecting social functioning, can also have a profound effect on sensory processing. Although no two cases of autism are alike, it’s estimated that up to 90 percent of children ...read more

Juno's Flight NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft is about to fly past Jupiter yet again to gather more data on the gas giant. On Dec. 21, at 11:49:48 a.m. EST, Juno will pass just 3,140 miles (5,053 km) from Jupiter's cloud tops at 128,802 miles per hour. This will be the spacecraft’s 16th science pass of the planet, meaning that Juno's prime mission will be halfway complete. With this 16th flyby, the Juno mission will have observed the entire planet, Jack Connerney,& ...read more

Absent serious action on climate change, we'll continue careening toward a climatic cliff. And modern civilization will be hard-pressed to survive the plunge. This is the essential take-away from new research probing Earth's climatic past to yield insights into our future. The research finds that if our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue unabated, Earth's climate will warm by the year 2150 to levels not seen since the largely ice-free Eocene Epoc ...read more

Exercise is good for us in a lot of ways. It helps cut the pounds, increases cardiovascular health, adds muscle mass and can boost our mood. What it also does, though, is help keep our bones strong. Studies have shown that regular exercise, especially involving weights, ups bone mass and maintains the health of our skeletal system. For us spring chickens, having strong bones might not sound all that critical, as our skeleton seems to get by just fine no matter what we do. But in the elder ...read more

Supernovae are the explosive end stages of massive stars. About 2.6 million years ago, one such supernova lit up Earth’s sky from about 150 light-years away. A few hundred years later, after the new star had long since faded from the sky, cosmic rays from the event finally reached Earth, slamming into our planet. Now, a group of researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas believes this cosmic onslaught is linked to a mass extinction of ocean animals roaming Earth’s w ...read more

Monitoring the well-being of Antarctica’s delicate ecosystem just got a little bit easier thanks to a very unlikely source: penguin poop. By analyzing over 40 years of Antarctic images gathered by seven satellites as part of the Landsat program, a NASA-funded team of researchers recently uncovered new details about the lives of Antarctica's Adélie penguins — a species that may help reveal past and future threats to one of the most unspoiled regions in the world ...read more

In Mexico, corn tortillas rule the kitchen. After all, maize began evolving there from a grass called teosinte some 9,000 years ago, eventually becoming a staple consumed around the world. But that spread presents a puzzle. In 5,300-year-old remains of maize from Mexico, genes from the wild relative show that the plant was still only partly domesticated. Yet archaeological evidence shows that a fully domesticated variety was being grown in South America more than 1,000 years before that. ...read more

A medical procedure transferred a key component of Alzheimer’s disease from one person to another, finds a new study published today in the journal Nature. The discovery suggests the seeds of the devastating neurodegenerative disease are transmissible. “It is a new way of thinking about the condition,” John Collinge, a neurologist at the University of College London in the United Kingdom, who led the new research, told reporters during a media briefing. Odd Autopsy Three years ...read more

Launching Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic has followed through with their ambitious goal to launch their SpaceShipTwo vehicle into space before Christmas. Today, the aerospace company successfully launched four NASA-supported technologies and two brave test pilots aboard the suborbital space plane into space and then landed safely back on Earth. [embed]https://twitter.com/virgingalactic/status/1073246723114381312[/embed] Today, SpaceShipTwo, named the VSS Unity, launched for space, ...read more

The idea of shrinking things down to a more convenient size seems so enticing. It’s a superpower for Ant-Man, kicks off the adventures in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and, of course, the Simpsons had fun with the idea too. (Shrinkage has come up in other contexts, as well.) Now, in real life, a team of MIT and Harvard scientists has gotten in on the fun by devising a new way of constructing nanomaterials — tiny machines or structures on the order of just a billionth of a meter. The ...read more