Did malaria hitch a ride with ancient humans out of Africa? People typically develop the disease after sporozoites, the infectious form of a Plasmodium parasite, are injected into the bloodstream by mosquitoes. (Credit: NIAID/Wikimedia Commons)
Millions of people annually contract malaria after infection by nasty little parasites belonging to the genus Plasmodium. Thanks to new genomic insights, researchers believe they’ve uncovered a key chunk of the disease ...read more
Discover photo editor Ernie Mastroianni photographed the total solar eclipse as seen from Glendo State Park in Wyoming on Aug. 21, 2017.
Day turning to dusk in the span of minutes, sunsets all around, a jewel-bright ring in the sky where the sun once stood — an eclipse is an otherworldly experience. But, if there’s one thing we like to do with amazing experiences, it’s try to make them better. Though you may have already guessed, a new study provides the confirmation: Lo ...read more
Glacier Peak in Washington. Wikimedia Commons.
One of the most potentially dangerous volcanoes in the Cascades is Glacier Peak in Washington. It produced the one of the largest eruptions in the past 20,000 years in this volcanic range that spans from British Columbia to California. Multiple eruptions around 13,500 years ago spread ash all the way into Montana. Over the last 2,000 years, there have been multiple explosive eruptions that have impacted what became Washington state and beyond. ...read more
Over the past few weeks, the stories of three high-profile scientists accused of bullying have emerged: geneticist Nazneen Rahman, psychologist Tania Singer and astrophysicist Guinevere Kauffmann.
Each of these researchers are (or were) at the top of their fields, recipients of huge amounts of funding. They are accused of abuses of power, bullying and abuse of their subordinates and creating a climate of fear in their institutions.
It would be easy to look to the personal characteristics of th ...read more
A scientist’s achievements are often measured in terms of the number of papers they publish (productivity) and how many citations those papers get (impact). These ‘bibliometric indicators’ are widely derided but they have proven remarkably stubborn.
Now, in a new preprint on bioRxiv, researchers Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström propose a new metric that, they say, could measure another important researcher characteristic: independence.
For van den Besselaar and S ...read more
A new model of Super-Earths implies many of these planets are covered in enormous, thick oceans. (Credit: NASA)
Water is a key ingredient for life — and new research suggests we might find it all over the galaxy.
Scientists looked at the mass of Super-Earths, a kind of planet common across the cosmos but not present in our own solar system. These rocky worlds are several times larger than Earth, but the team’s analysis of known Super-Earths reveals something astounding: Many of the ...read more
The Sacrifice of Iphigeneia, a mythological depiction of a sacrificial procession on a mosaic from Roman Spain. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the demigod and his comrade Enkidu rip out the heart of the Bull of Heaven as a gift to the sun god Shamash. This bloody act is far from the only time sacrifice makes an appearance in the world’s most ancient stories, and in some tales such rituals claim human lives, or almost. In Greek myth, King Agamemnon dec ...read more
Alien it most certainly is not. But the word ‘venous’ is not far from the mark. So just what is this thing anyway?
An alien venous system? (Source: NASA Earth Observatory)
When I first spotted this mesmerizing animation on Twitter, my mind really did wander to the metaphorical idea of blood flowing through some sort of alien venous system.
And actually, to the extent that a river can be the lifeblood of a region, you are looking at something akin to a venous system.
The t ...read more
Pioneer 10 flies past Jupiter as the first mission to the giant planet.(Credit: NASA on the Commons (Flickr))
Before Voyager 1 and 2 explored the outer solar system, Pioneer 10 and 11 paved the way. Launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, these spacecraft were the first to transit the asteroid belt and the first to make close observations of Jupiter (both Pioneer 10 and 11) and Saturn (Pioneer 11). Like their successors, the Voyagers and New Horizons, both Pioneers are past the orbit of Pluto ...read more
Using remote camera traps, photographer Heath Holden captured rare images like this one of wild Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) in their natural habitat. The animals’ bright red ears and eerie, raucous scuffles earned the scrappy marsupials their haunting common name. (Credit: Heath Holden)
On a misty summer morning in 2015, Manuel Ruiz ditched his pickup truck along a dusty two-track road in northwest Tasmania and trod into a grove of eucalyptus. He was searching for a devil. &l ...read more
