A satellite was watching as the blaze expanded by half the size of San Francisco and began its deadly rampage into a California city
An animation of satellite images shows a giant cloud erupting from California’s Carr Fire late in the afternoon of July 26, 2018. (Note: If the animation does not load after you click on the screenshot, make sure to hit ‘play’ in the upper left corner of the animation website. If there is a delay, try refresh ...read more
Do you live in Mexico, the United States, or Canada? Then starting tomorrow, you can join in the second International Monarch Monitoring Blitz. From July 28 to August 5, it’s time for #MissionMonarch.
By joining in on the Blitz, you help identify the monarch butterfly’s breeding sites, a task essential to its survival. You can do this by monitoring milkweed and monarch eggs, as well as by taking note of caterpillars, pupae and adults.
Though monarch butter ...read more
A section of the Gorgan Wall in the hills. (Credit: Arman Ershadi)
Golestan Province in Northern Iran is a unique landscape. Sandwiched between the temperate forests of the Alborz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, a narrow corridor connects Persia with the desert steppes of Central Asia. The passage measures 120 miles across from sea to mountain, and it’s made of fertile rolling plains rising to windswept hills. The ancient name for this place was Gorgan (گ&Os ...read more
Satellite image of green vortex swirling in the Gulf of Finland on July 18. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory)
I hope you’ll excuse the exaggerated exuberance in the headline, but when I saw the image above, and then the animation lower down in this story, my first reaction really was to exclaim out loud “whoa!�
I was really struck by the two very curious whirlpool-like features on opposite sides of Earth — one giga ...read more
A California two-spot octopus. (Credit: Greg Amptman/Shutterstock)
A neuroscientist and a marine biologist got together and decided to give octopuses MDMA. It sounds like a joke, but it really happened, and the results reveal something unique about our neurocircuitry and human evolution.
Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this ...read more
(Credit: mimagephotography/shutterstock)
Seeing a smile can make a person unconsciously smile in return, and now scientists find that digitally mimicking the voice of a smiling person can also make people reflexively smile.
Charles Darwin and his contemporaries were among the first scientists to investigate smiles. Darwin suggested that smiles and several other facial expressions are universal to all humans, rather than unique products of a person’s culture.
â€&oe ...read more
When it comes to studying cocaine addiction, one group of researchers has stomach acid on their brains.
In a paper published Thursday in PLOS Biology, researchers find that a surgery that diverts some bile acid into the bloodstream seems to cut back cravings among mice with a cocaine habit.
It’s a nifty angle on a pernicious problem, but it’s also another piece of evidence that bile acid, a compound produced by our ...read more
Signals in the brain hop from neuron to neuron at a speed of roughly 390 feet per second. Light, on the other hand, travels 186,282 miles in a second. Imagine the possibilities if we were that quick-witted.
Well, computers are getting there.
Researchers from UCLA on Thursday revealed a 3D-printed, optical neural network that allows computers to solve complex mathematical computations at the speed of light.
In other words, we don’t stand a chance.
Hyperbole aside, research ...read more
On Thursday, astronomers announced the first observations of the effect of a black hole’s gravitational redshift — light coming from a star in the gravitational field near a black hole looked redder than it would’ve outside the black hole’s influence.
The black hole responsible was Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star�), the supermassive black hole at the center of our M ...read more
