Photo: Flickr/Steven Guzzardi [Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. En ...read more

NASA’s Terra satellite spied this heart-shaped hole in the cloud deck over the Pacific on August 7, 2018. (Source: NASA Worldview) I’m always on the look out for interesting images of Earth shot from space so that I can share them here at ImaGeo. And when I saw the one above, I just couldn’t resist it. Source: NASA Worldview Often, the cloud deck extends along the coast of California and down into Baja in a more or less continuous manner, as you can see in the image at righ ...read more

(Credit: Alena Hovorkova/shutterstock) A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. The first dance at my wedding lasted exactly four minutes and 52 seconds, but I’ll probably remember it for decades. Neuroscientists still don’t entirely understand this: How was my brain able to translate this less-than-five-minute experience into a lifelong memory? Part of the puzzle is that there’s a gap between experience and memory: our experiences are fleeting, but ...read more

(Credit: bitt24/Shutterstock) Vitamins and other nutrients that we cannot make for ourselves are called essential. It’s a misleading term because “essential” most often means “important,” but in the world of dietetics, it denotes that we must obtain it in our diets. For example, vitamin Q, also called ubiquinone, is extremely important – it’s crucial for cellular respiration in the mitochondria – but it is not deemed essential because our cells s ...read more

The Dukovany Nuclear Power Station in the Czech Republic. (Credit: zhangyang13576997233/Shutterstock) There are 99 nuclear reactors currently operating in the United States. The power they generate is free of carbon dioxide emissions, but as a byproduct, they also generate small amounts of nuclear waste in the form of depleted uranium. Even after the uranium in the fuel reactors is spent, or depleted, it remains radioactive, and that means storing it is difficult. Controversy over a permanent ...read more

As more than 140 new wildfires erupted in British Columbia and Washington State, a weather satellite captured this dramatic imagery An animation of satellite imagery shows multiple wildfires burning across British Columbia and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Areas of active burning look like glittering embers in a campfire. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA/GOES-16 Loop of the Day) Wildfires blazing in California have received a huge amount of attention in recent weeks. But this summer& ...read more

Researchers say a new Utah pterosaur, skull fragments sketched in (b), appears closely related to another species of the flying archosaur from England (c). (Credit Britt et al 2018, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0627-y) More than 200 million years ago, a shadow traveled across the hot, arid landscape of what’s now the western United States. It belonged to a Late Triassic pterosaur that may have been the biggest of its time. Describing its size, features and home turf, resea ...read more