A red panda perches in a tree. (Credit: Frenchwildlifephotograher/shutterstock)
Mammals are going extinct at an alarmingly accelerated rate. Now, researchers say that recovering the lost biodiversity will take millions of years. The discovery suggests shifting conservation tactics to protect evolutionarily distinct species.
Looming Species Loss
Mass extinctions — when Earth loses more than three quarters of its species in a short geological period — have happened five tim ...read more
Can we go to Mars without going crazy? In May 2001, Discover’s cover story asked exactly that, exploring unanswered questions about the psychological perils of humans crammed together and flung through space.
At the time, scientists didn’t have much data to predict how people would handle the six-month journey. Researchers realized interpersonal skills and camaraderie would be critical to success.
We’re still not sure how things would go. But growing interest in the mental risk ...read more
A dubious predatory academic publisher called Open Access Publishing London (OAPL) seems to have died. Their website has gone down, taking some 1,500 scientific papers with it. What can we learn from this?
Long-time readers will remember my series of posts on OAPL back from when I first investigated it in 2013. As far as I can tell, it was a one-man operation. The man turned out to be a Dr. Waseem Jerjes. Jerjes is a dental surgeon with many legitimate research papers to his name, and he was fo ...read more
My favorite stock image of God, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (Credit: Creative Commons)
It’s natural to believe in the supernatural. Consider how many people worldwide belong to a religion: nearly 6 billion, or 84 percent of the global population, and these figures are expected to rise in the coming decades. In the U.S., surveys show 90 percent of adults believe in some higher power, spiritual force or God with a capital G. Even self-proclaimed atheists have supernatural lean ...read more
This month, the five brightest planets in our solar system align and be visible in the night sky. (Credit: Derek Bruff/flickr, CC BY-NC)
For the second time this year, the five brightest planets in our solar system — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars — will be visible in the night sky at the same time.
The planets will form a line that rises up from the horizon in the western sky and it will be easiest to see after sunset this Thursday, October 18. However, all month t ...read more
Hayabusa2’s view of Ryugu as the craft descended towards the asteroid October 15, 2018 in the first of two touchdown rehearsals. (Credit: JAXA)
This past summer, Hayabusa2 — a spacecraft, operated by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA, sent to collect and return asteroid samples — arrived at asteroid Ryugu. Today, the craft comes close to the asteroid in the first of two touchdown rehearsals.
After reaching the asteroid on June 27, Hayabusa2 primarily observed Ryugu from “Th ...read more
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory went into Safe Mode on October 10. An investigation is underway to find the reason why. (Credit: NASA/CXC)
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will soon be observing the cosmos once again, the space agency said Monday. A scare last week left the spacecraft in safe mode. Chandra is a space observatory that observes extreme objects that emit X-rays, like black holes. The problems with Chandra surfaced on October 10, just days after the iconic Hubble Space ...read more
This week, we discuss kidnappings & gunpoint attacks demanding cryptocurrency. We often say that cryptocurrency is unseizable. But in one sense, it’s actually more seizable than dollars in your bank account: Kidnappers’ crypto accounts, unlike bank accounts, are unfreezable and are themselves unseizable — making stolen funds completely unrecoverable.
What can we do to be safe from ransom and wrench attacks?
Bitgenstein’s Table is a narrative podcast with m ...read more
A new review paper in The Neuroscientist highlights the problem of body movements for neuroscience, from blinks to fidgeting.
Authors Patrick J Drew and colleagues of Penn State discuss how many types of movements are associated with widespread brain activation, which can contaminate brain activity recordings. This is true, they say, of both humans and experimental animals such as rodents, e.g. with their ‘whisking’ movements of the whiskers.
A particular concern is that many moveme ...read more
Neil Armstrong (left) as portrayed by Ryan Gosling in First Man (Credit: Universal)
First Man is not like other movies about the space race, and I mean that in a very good way.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical about the director of La La Land telling the story of Neil Armstrong’s historic landing on the Moon. (Would there be songs? A scowling J.K. Simmons?) It turns out to be a synergistic pairing of artist and material. First Man brushes aside the expected saga of space cowboys saddlin ...read more
