From the way you move and sleep, to how you interact with people around you, depression changes just about everything. It is even noticeable in the way you speak and express yourself in writing. Sometimes this “language of depression” can have a powerful effect on others. Just consider the impact of the poetry and song lyrics of Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain, who both killed themselves after suffering from depression. Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship betw ...read more

The question of how much wood a woodchuck can chuck may need to be reevaluated — new research published today in Nature reveals a process that can create wood with a strength-to-weight ratio stronger than most metals. Harder, Better, Stronger Many of the high-performance structural materials available today have at least one major drawback. Metals like steel may be strong, but they are also heavy and environmentally damaging. Composites and polymer-based materials work around these drawbac ...read more

Bombardier beetles are the Agent Ks of the insect world. You’ll recall, Men in Black’s Agent K (played by Tommy Lee Jones) exacts revenge after being swallowed by a giant cockroach alien at the New York State Pavilion. Agent K went down the alien’s gullet, but fired his weapon from inside the beast’s stomach (if it had one) blowing the bug into smithereens and spreading gooey guts everywhere. It was a fitting grand finale to the first installment of the franchise. Thoug ...read more

Take a moment and let this one sink in. It sure seems like the photographer turned a bit to the left before snapping the right-hand image. It's the lines in the cobblestones — they're all tilted in the second image compared to the first. A second glance reveals some irregularities, though. Though the lines look tilted relative to each other, the rest of the image looks unchanged. The trucks are in the same place, we see the same patch of sky, and if you look closely, we se ...read more

The Sun recently decided to go naked for awhile, as is evident from this image acquired by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It lost its spots. The image is from a video posted by NASA showing the Sun going naked from Jan. 26th to Jan. 30th, when a very small, lonely spot finally turns up. In fact, NASA says that with the exception of this one spot, the Sun was naked for almost two weeks. Spotless periods like this are common as the Sun approaches the low p ...read more

I’m a scientist and my job is to look below the surface of the earth. One of the questions often asked of people working with what we call geophysical imaging is, “How deep can you see?” It’s a difficult question to answer of course, since one person’s “deep” is another person’s “shallow”, and what is deep to the archaeologist will barely scratch the surface for the planetary seismologist. For my own part, I’m a “near-surfa ...read more

SpaceX will today attempt to launch its largest rocket yet, the Falcon Heavy. An upgraded version of the Falcon 9 rocket the spaceflight company has been flying for over two years now, the latest addition to the SpaceX arsenal will be capable of lifting more payload to orbit than any rocket today. The launch is set for sometime between 1:30 and 4:00 p.m. Eastern today. The payload will is a red Tesla roadster (playing David Bowie's "Space Oddity," naturally), and the SpaceX CEO says i ...read more

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Defense became the latest agency to adopt a burgeoning start-up boot camp pioneered by the National Science Foundation’s Errol Arkilic. In 2011, Arkilic reached out to Steve Blank, a Stanford University professor who would soon be one of Silicon Valley’s most influential innovators. “I’ve been reading your blog,” Arkilic told Blank. He had 10,000 scientists hoping to turn their research into tech startups. Blank’s m ...read more

A series of papers out today gives us further insights into the TRAPPIST-1 system discovered in 2016. The seven planets that make up the system orbit a dim red dwarf star much smaller and cooler than our own Sun. The planets' orbits are much tighter than in our solar system, and they're all closer to their home star than Mercury is to the Sun. Three of them are thought to be in the "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist. The TRAPPIST Seven The system is relatively close, only 4 ...read more

In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of Spanish astronomers announced the discovery of one of the first stars to form in the Milky Way. The unevolved star, called J0815+4729, is located 7,500 light-years away in the halo of the Milky Way and likely formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, some 13.5 billion years ago. “We know of only a few stars (which can be counted on the fingers of a hand) of this type in the halo [of the Milky W ...read more