(Credit: Andrey_Popov/shutterstock)
Trillions of bacteria call the human gut home. The bugs affect not only our digestion but our hormones and immune systems, too. Now researchers show most of the microbes that colonize mammals’ guts pass down from generation to generation. The few that don’t tend to be the kind that makes us sick. The discovery suggests pathogens evolved to spread between individuals instead of through inheritance.
Generation to Generation
Andrew Moeller, an ...read more
This image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, shows galaxy cluster SDSS J0333+0651. (Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)
Galaxy clusters house thousands of galaxies and endless streams of stars.
Such a dense urban environment may sound like an ideal home for a galaxy, right? Not exactly. Astronomers know that once a galaxy is absorbed by a massive cluster, its star formation soon comes to a halt. And for years, researchers have tried to figure out why this phenomenon, known as &ldq ...read more
A Plan for the Inevitable
Though this is a serious problem, there is an alternative. The car companies could accept that humans will be humans, acknowledge that our minds will wander. After all, being able to read a book while driving is part of the appeal of self-driving cars.
Some manufacturers have already started to build their cars to accommodate our inattention. Audi’s Traffic Jam Pilot is one example. It can completely take over when you’re in slow-moving highway traffic, leav ...read more
Scientists used the gene editing technology CRISPR to stop these pigs from getting a deadly flu. (Credit: Kristin Whitworth/University of Missouri)
As flu season rears its ugly head, humans aren’t the only ones on virus’ warpath. Pigs are also vulnerable to deadly infections. Porcine illness can mean huge losses for farmers and price hikes for pork. Now, new research shows gene editing could be a solution.
“One of the greatest concerns for U.S. producers is outbreaks of new [ ...read more
3200 Phaethon, a blue rocky object, continues to puzzle scientists, but a close flyby last year answered a few lingering questions as researchers continue to study this weird rock. (Credit: Heather Roper/University of Arizona)
A weird, blue rock known as 3200 Phaethon, or more commonly Phaethon, got pretty close to Earth last year. That gave scientists a unique opportunity to study it up close — and they found that this blue asteroid (that acts like a comet) is even stranger than th ...read more
(Credit: Ben McKinley, Curtin University/Icrar/Astro 3d. Moon Image Courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.)
Radio waves from our home galaxy, the Milky Way, reflect off the surface of the moon in this intriguing image created by a research team working with the The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescopes in the Australian desert. The remote location was chosen for its extremely low levels of interference from earthly radio stations.
The team, led by Benjamin McKinley of ...read more
The Kaaba, a shrine at the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca, considered the most sacred spot on Earth by Muslims. (Credit: By ESB Professional/Shutterstock)
Why isn’t Mickey Mouse a god?
This is a serious question for researchers studying the evolution of religion, and it offers some insight into the question of why some religions have persisted while others haven’t.
The so-called Mickey Mouse problem is an oft-cited, catchy critique of the idea that religion is merely a by ...read more
A 15,000-year-old projectile may provide indirect evidence for how and when people first arrived in the Americas. (Credit: Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University)
Thousands of artifacts from a site in Central Texas, including a dozen projectile points, have provided researchers with new clues about the arrival and spread of First Americans on the continent. The items, which are up to 15,500 years old, hint that the Americas may have been populated i ...read more
Some of the data painstakingly recovered from digs each year is irretrievably lost. (Credit: krugloff/Shutterstock)
Archaeology – the name conjures up images of someone carefully sifting the sands for traces of the past and then meticulously putting those relics in a museum. But today’s archaeology is not just about retrieving artifacts and drawing maps by hand. It also uses the tools of today: 3D imaging, LiDAR scans, GPS mapping and more.
Today, nearly all archaeological fieldwor ...read more
