Map of shaking felt by the M7.3 earthquake in Venezuela on August 21, 2018. USGS.
Venezuela was hit by a M7.3 earthquake today, causing extensive damage across the northern part of the country as well as nearby Trinidad & Tobago. Shaking was felt as far away at Bogotá, Martinique and Guyana, thousands of kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter. This temblor may have the largest earthquake to strike Venezuela since a M7.7 hit off of Caracas in 1900.
Video and images of th ...read more
These rare-earth oxides are used as tracers to determine which parts of a watershed are eroding. Clockwise from top center: praseodymium, cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, samarium, and gadolinium. (Credit: Peggy Greb, US Department of Agriculture)
Most Americans use rare earth elements every day – without knowing it, or knowing anything about what they do. That could change, as these unusual materials are becoming a focal point in the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China.
Stanley ...read more
Waiting by the Phone
For now, engineers continue to listen to Mars for signals from Opportunity at her programmed fault check-in intervals. They also send prompts to the rover and listen for a response during these times. The team has also essentially widened the net — the radio science group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is listening daily for Opportunity on a broader range of frequencies than normal, using specialized radio equipment focused on Mars during most of the daylight hours a ...read more
The image shows the concentration of water ice on the lunar surface. The south pole and its hefty concentration of ice within craters is shown on the left, and the right shows the more sporadic, wide spread ice on the north pole. (Credit: NASA)
We’ve seen evidence of ice deposits on the surfaces of Mercury and Ceres, but we can now add a much closer celestial body to the club.
Research published on August 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that spec ...read more
A new wave of synthetic drugs is causing overdoses across the country. (Credit: busliq/shutterstock)
An explosion of strange new narcotics is hitting the streets, as clandestine chemists rush to produce drugs that exist outside the law.
One United Nations report tallied 644 new drugs discovered across 102 countries and territories between 2008 and 2015. And in an interview last year, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesperson said they encounter previously unheard of drugs on an almost wee ...read more
A subtle tweak in brain organization happened more than 60 million years ago. Without it, humans never could have evolved. (Credit: Jolygon/shutterstock)
Suzana Herculano-Houzel spent most of 2003 perfecting a macabre recipe—a formula for brain soup. Sometimes she froze the jiggly tissue in liquid nitrogen, and then she liquefied it in a blender. Other times she soaked it in formaldehyde and then mashed it in detergent, yielding a smooth, pink slurry.
Herculano-Houzel had completed her P ...read more
Offshore oil rigs have become refuges for marine species around the world. But now many of these sites are being dismantled. (Credit: Richard Whitcombe/shutterstock)
The rugged North Sea, between Norway and the United Kingdom, once held some of the world’s most productive offshore petroleum fields. And across the region, oil rigs still tower above the ocean floor — their beams crisscrossing up from the watery depths like mechanical mountains.
But with productivity and oil prices in ...read more
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope doesn’t need a time machine to peer into the distant past.
Thanks to its ability to detect ultraviolet (UV) light, Hubble was able to assemble this panoramic image of our ancient, star-bursting universe. Spanning vast periods of time and space, the composite photo features about 15,000 galaxies, 12,000 of which are actively birthing hot, young stars. ...read more
Did malaria hitch a ride with ancient humans out of Africa? People typically develop the disease after sporozoites, the infectious form of a Plasmodium parasite, are injected into the bloodstream by mosquitoes. (Credit: NIAID/Wikimedia Commons)
Millions of people annually contract malaria after infection by nasty little parasites belonging to the genus Plasmodium. Thanks to new genomic insights, researchers believe they’ve uncovered a key chunk of the disease ...read more
Discover photo editor Ernie Mastroianni photographed the total solar eclipse as seen from Glendo State Park in Wyoming on Aug. 21, 2017.
Day turning to dusk in the span of minutes, sunsets all around, a jewel-bright ring in the sky where the sun once stood — an eclipse is an otherworldly experience. But, if there’s one thing we like to do with amazing experiences, it’s try to make them better. Though you may have already guessed, a new study provides the confirmation: Lo ...read more
