Researchers have found evidence of pneumonia and a tuberculosis-like infection in a marine reptile, similar to the nothosaur shown here, that lived 245 million years ago. (Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons) One of the oldest diseases to haunt our species — the lung infection known as pneumonia — is actually a lot older. Evidence of pneumonia, and possible tuberculosis, has turned up in a marine reptile that’s 245 million years old. Researchers analyzed a fragmentary s ...read more

Flour and eggs (Photo Credit: Steven Du) Guest post by Steven Du Paste, the Latin Late antiquity translation for the word Pasta. [3] Eating spaghetti and meatballs today typically involves boiling some dried spaghetti pasta and pouring on some pasta sauce from a jar. But have you ever wondered how to make these golden silky strands of noodles? To start off, we have to sail to China with Marco Polo and learn about the origins of Bing. Bing is Chinese for wheat products and dumplings. [3] The rea ...read more

Pluto is a beautiful world, with ice mountains, nitrogen glaciers, a haze-layered atmosphere, and methane dunes. But all that complexity does not necessarily make it a “planet.” (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI) I love Pluto. I grew up entranced by this strange little world: What could you be, you rebel that doesn’t seem to follow any of the rules? I even wrote a childhood letter to a local astronomer, offering my homespun hypothesis that Pluto might be a captured fragment of an exp ...read more

Well, Einstein’s done it again! That is to say, the gravitational theories of Albert Einstein have once again been confirmed, and to a new degree of precision. The equations of general relativity predicted a certain quantity would be zero, and physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have calculated a record-low, unbelievably tiny result — basically, as good to zero as we can get. So what did they measure? The variation between different ultra-precise ...read more

We all know a bullshitter. They can shoot off explanations and rationales for just about anything — even if they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re not liars, purposefully hiding the truth, but they certainly don’t care if what they’re saying is true or not. Scientists have studied the phenomenon before, digging into how we perceive bullshit and its consequences. But what makes us actually bullshit in the first place? That’s what psychologis ...read more

Curiosity’s self portrait on Mars. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) After suffering more than a year with a broken drill, NASA’s 5-year-old Mars rover Curiosity is now collecting and analyzing samples once again. The drill sits at the end of Curiosity’s LeBron James-sized robotic arm and is vital for grabbing and dropping dirt into the spacecraft’s onboard laboratory. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) put many months of effort into hacking ...read more

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zipped by Pluto at 31,000 mph in July 2015, it captured a plethora of breathtaking photos of the distant dwarf planet’s surface. Within these highly detailed images, researchers noticed what looked to be an extensive system of strange dunes stretching 75 miles along the boundary of Pluto’s massive Al-Idrisi Montes mountain range and Sputnik Planitia — a nitrogen-ice plain that forms the left lobe of the planet’s fa ...read more

A dyeing poison frog showing off its bright colors. Photo by Bernard DUPONT The conspicuous colors of poison frogs are presumed to be a warning. Indeed, vibrant patterns so often signal toxicity that biologists even have a special term for them: aposematic coloration. But, weird as it might sound, new research suggests that radiant skin patterns might help these frogs stay hidden, too. Poison frogs are armed with some of the planet’s most potent toxins. T ...read more

Lava flows approaching Kapoho Bay in the lower East Rift Zone of Hawaii on June 3, 2018. USGS/HVO The active eruption from Fissure 8 on Kīlauea has now produced a lava flow that is reaching the ocean at Kapoho Bay — across the middle of “Vacationland Hawaii” (see above), another development with many houses. The lava flow is forming a lava delta into Kapoho Bay, extending the land out into the ocean. The lava flow itself is almost 0.8 kilometers wide when it ...read more