The spectacular Geminid meteor shower peaks the night of December 13/14. Although many people consider it to be a poor cousin to August’s Perseid shower, the Geminids often put on a better show. This year, observers can expect to see up to 120 “shooting stars” per hour — an average of nearly two per minute — under a dark sky. Viewing conditions could hardly be better for the Geminids this year. The waxing crescent moon sets around 10:30 p.m. local time, leaving the ...read more

Escaping the Heliosphere Humanity has another interstellar emissary. After launching in 1977, NASA’s trailblazing spacecraft Voyager 2 has finally escaped the heliosphere, the Sun's protective bubble of charged particles. It follows in the path of its sibling,  Voyager 1, which crossed into interstellar space in 2012. The Sun's solar wind makes up the heliosphere, which surrounds us and all of the planets in our solar system. The boundary where the hot solar wind ...read more

OSIRIS-REx Findings OSIRIS-REx has been busy ever since it arrived at the asteroid Bennu on December 3. The latest updates from NASA reveal that the space rock is porous, blue, and covered in massive boulders. More excitingly, they discovered evidence that Bennu's minerals interacted with water at some point in its distant past. During a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, NASA's OSIRIS-REx team revealed the first results from their spacecraft's ...read more

Making lava to blow it up — that’s what scientists at the University of Buffalo have been up to. The first results of a long-term study led by Ingo Sonder, shown here stirring molten rock, were published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The group has been cooking up lava in 10-gallon batches and injecting them with water to better understand the explosive reactions that sometimes occur when the two meet. “If you think about a volcanic eruption, there ...read more

Babies to order. Andrew crotty/Shutterstock.com When Adam Nash was still an embryo, living in a dish in the lab, scientists tested his DNA to make sure it was free of Fanconi anemia, the rare inherited blood disease from which his sister Molly suffered. They also checked his DNA for a marker that would reveal whether he shared the same tissue type. Molly needed a donor match for stem cell therapy, and her parents were determined to find one. Adam was conceived so the stem cells in his umbil ...read more

An intriguing new study uses the 2016 US Presidential election as a tool to examine the organization of human memory. The results show that events that occur around the same time are linked in memory. Remembering one past event tends to trigger the recall of other memories from that time. This chronological clustering makes intuitive sense, but it's a theory that's been debated in psychology for a while, under the name of the temporal-contiguity effect (TCE). According to the authors of th ...read more

  The genetic modification of crops (GMOs) and the concept of designer babies (thanks to CRISPR technology) may be two of the most recognizable, yet controversial, topics related to the field of genetic engineering. At its core, genetic engineering, also known as bioengineering, is the genetic modification of an organism. Some view genetic engineering as an enigmatic topic, shrouded in mystery and limited to the lab. However, genetic engineering isn’t limited to the labora ...read more

This summer, in the introductory course I teach on the evolution and biology of human and animal behavior, I showed my students a website that demonstrates how to identify frog “genders.” I explained that this was a misuse of the term “gender”; what the author meant was how to identify frog sexes. Gender, I told the students, goes far beyond mere sex differences in appearance or behavior. It refers to something complex and abstract that may well be unique to Homo sapiens. ...read more

Humans have language and other animals don’t. That’s obvious, but how it happened is not. Since Darwin’s time, scientists have puzzled over the evolution of language. They can observe the present-day product: People today have the capacity for language, whether it be spoken, signed or written. And they can infer the starting state: The communication systems of other apes suggest abilities present in our shared ancestor. But the million-dollar question is what happened in betwe ...read more

Even just 30 days in space can significantly reduce our immune system’s ability to fight infection, suggests a new analysis of mice that spent a month aboard an orbiting spacecraft. The research, which was published December 6 in the journal Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, is a recent analysis of data from the Bion-M1 mission, which was a collaborative project carried out by NASA and the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems in 2013. Space Mice As ...read more