Spidey-senses tingling? It’s time to fly. Though those of us without arachnid superpowers might not notice, we are constantly surrounded by electric fields. The ground carries a slight negative charge and the atmosphere is slightly positive, and, as a consequence, negatively charged particles can be borne up into the air. Some kinds of spiders may be taking advantage of the effect to hitch rides on the fields using negatively charged spide ...read more

For decades, astronomers have thought that planets form out of the rotating disks of debris that encircle most newly formed stars. Within these so-called protoplanetary disks — which can be up to 1,000 astronomical units wide (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance of 93 million miles) — particles of gas and dust clump together over time, slowly but surely forming larger bodies that may eventually reach planetary status. However, despite years of searching, ...read more

At some point in the last 4 million or so years, our hominin ancestors climbed down from the trees and got grounded. The transition between arboreal and terrestrial was, like just about everything in evolution, gradual. For decades researchers have debated, often heatedly, which hominin species was the first to be fully bipedal, walking and running rather than climbing. Today, great answers come in small packages: A rare, mostly-complete juvenile hominin foot reveals new and unprecedented ...read more

The Northern White Rhino is basically extinct — just two living females remain — yet scientists announced Wednesday that they’ve found a way to bring the species back from the brink. In a paper published July 4 in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers say they’ve created a first-ever hybrid rhino embryo outside the womb. The scientists extracted a kind of egg cells called oocytes fro ...read more

In recent years, scientists have developed drugs can help shrink cancerous tumors. Several of these target P13K, an enzyme involved in cellular growth that is known to contribute to causing cancers. But the anti-cancer drugs that target P13K don’t work as well as scientists had hoped. The problem is that the drugs also cause a spike in insulin, which helps tumors grow. The spike could compromise the effectiveness of the cancer therapies. One solution is to supplement a pati ...read more

Albert Einstein’s been having quite a few weeks! First his “imaginary elevatorâ€� thought experiment was confirmed with unprecedented precision, then his theory of relativity was shown to create gravitational lenses as expected even in other galaxies. And today, we learn that a central tenet of relativity still holds even at gravitational extremes. It’s no annus mirabilis, but it ain’t bad. Todayâ ...read more

Dead gharials began washing up on the banks of India’s Chambal River in December 2007. Over the following weeks, the body count grew. By mid-January, the dead reptiles—some the length of two tall men, lined up end to end—numbered in the dozens. By March, more than 110 of the skinny-snouted creatures had been found dead, most along a 30-kilometer (18-mile) stretch of river. At the time, there were thought to be just 200 to 250 breeding-ag ...read more

Coconut crabs (Birgus latro) are gigantic land-dwelling crabs found on islands throughout the Indo-Pacific. They can live for decades, and can grow to be more than 3 feet wide (legs outstretched) and weigh in at more than 6 pounds. So that name isn't because they're the size of a coconut—it's because they can actually tear open coconuts to eat their tender meat. "If a coconut falls out of a tree, they'll clamp onto&A ...read more

Fellas, has that Armani suit been calling your name lately? Maybe it’s because you’ve got some extra testosterone coursing through your system. A new study in the journal Nature Communications found that higher levels of the hormone impact men’s preference for high-end products. An international team of scientists worked with a group of over 240 men; half of them got an injection of testosterone gel while the other half got a placebo ge ...read more

A paper in Psychological Science was taking a beating on Twitter last month. https://twitter.com/lakens/status/1004119102485614592 In this post, I'm not going to talk about the paper itself but rather, about how it came to be published and how preregistration - a concept I have long advocated - may be being misused. The paper reports on five studies which all address the same general question. Of these, Study #3 was preregistered and the authors write that it was performed after ...read more