Ever since Rob Weryk first spotted ‘Oumuamua zipping through the solar system in October 2017, the peculiar object has been the target of intense scrutiny for astronomers from around the globe. After confirming the suspected asteroid reached a maximum speed of nearly 200,000 miles per hour during its closest approach to the Sun (and is shaped like a cigar), researchers quickly shifted their focus to determining the composition and origin of this mysteri ...read more
Hello friends!
After 8 years and 679 posts, the time has come for me to wrap up this blog. Most cephalopods don't live more than a year or two, so I've been very lucky.
I started Inkfish when I was working as a magazine editor; I wanted an outlet to share scientific stories that excited me with my friends and family, and maybe—I hoped—some other readers. Later I moved from good old Blogspot to the blog network Field of Science, and ...read more
When you think of Mozart, you probably imagine an 18th century gentleman who was always thinking about music. Well, it turns out that when not composing musical masterpieces, Mozart liked to talk about "shooting off his rear-end gun".  He was such a huge fan of potty humor that some historians, after reading a series of letters that Mozart wrote to his female cousin (the Bäsle letters), have proposed that he&A ...read more
It might look like Wilson the volleyball, but in reality, it’s something far more advanced. (Credit: IBM)
If you’ve been fantasizing about a real-life Hal or R2-D2, then your dreams are about to come true. Or at least, partly.
The German Aerospace Center commissioned aircraft manufacturer Airbus and artificial intelligence designers at IBM to create CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), the first AI-based astronaut assistant. CIMON, who is 11 pou ...read more
Plink! (Credit: Lipskiy/Shutterstock)
Utilizing modern high-speed video and audio capture techniques, researchers from the University of Cambridge are confident they have found the culprit behind one of the more aggravating household sounds — the dripping tap. Exactly what causes the recognizable ‘plink’ of dripping water when it lands into a liquid surface is revealed in a study recently released in Nature.
Right in the Middle of the Pi ...read more
(Credit: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock)
What would it be like to live forever? The thought has likely crossed your mind. But you soon sober up — it ain’t going to happen.
Nevertheless, the idea of living longer than your parents and grandparents is not farfetched. Better lifestyles (such as exercising regularly and not smoking) and better medical care have helped increase longevity in developed countries. People who otherwise would have died in their 60s from ...read more
(Credit: Sarah Jelbert)
There’s no denying crows are smart. They can remember where food has been hidden, recognize faces and craft tools. And, according to a new paper in Scientific Reports, some crows can even make those tools from memory. This skill may point to these clever corvids having a sort of culture of their own.
Brainy Birds
Researchers, led by Sarah Jelbert at the University of Cambridge, worked specifically with New Caledonian crows. These birds, native to the ...read more
(Credit: Arthur-studio10/Shutterstock)
Good news for anyone who enjoys singing, or being sarcastic — or really, just talking in general. Scientists have precisely mapped, and now better understand, the part of the brain that allows you to do what you do: change the pitch of your voice to hit notes or emphasize certain words.
The work, by a team of neuroscientists at the University of California, San Francisco, appears today in the journal Cell, and specifically looked at how ...read more
The dog has walked beside humans longer than any other animal, but science has only recently begun to understand how domestication occurred. (Credit: G. Tarlach)
Who’s a good dog? The very first dogs, apparently, as a new genetic study reveals the sequence of events, begun thousands of years ago, that morphed wild wolves into (eventually) couchwarmers and ball catchers.
If you wrote a book about animal domestication, the story of turning wolves into dogs would arguably deser ...read more
A science traverse in 2007 to 2009 crossed the East Antarctic Plateau in late summer. The coldest conditions on Earth occur in this region few months later, in July and August, during the polar night. (Photo: Ted Scambos, NSIDC.)
We’ve now got new insight into just how extreme conditions on our planet can get — at opposite ends of the thermometer.
In a new study, a team of researchers has found that some sites in Antarctica get as cold as minus 98 degrees C ...read more
