Welcome to Triassic Park! Researchers spent a decade working at remote African sites to fill in serious gaps in our understanding of life at the Dawn of the Dinosaur Age. The scene, including dino-relative Teleocrater in foreground, illustrates what mid-Triassic Tanzania might have looked like 240 million years ago. (Credit Mark Witton/Natural History Museum, London) You’ve probably heard about The Great Dying, more formally known as the End-Permian mass extinction, when more than 95 perc ...read more

A gun turret containing a Mark 12 5-inch gun from the USS Juneau that was discovered as part of the sunken warship’s wreckage on March 17, 2018. Credit: Navigea Ltd. One of the most well-known stories of family sacrifice in wartime is the loss of the five Sullivan brothers aboard the light cruiser USS Juneau during World War II. That story resurfaced after an expedition headed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen discovered wreckage from the USS Juneau lying on the ocean floor in the South ...read more

Asperitas cloud over Newtonia, Missouri, US. (Credit: © Elaine Patrick, Cloud Appreciation Society Member 31940) Clouds form in a multitude of different shapes and sizes, their infinite combinations and position across the sky offering a visual drama in response to the light conditions. But despite their apparent randomness, a detailed naming convention is in place to categorize them. When a cloud ultimately can’t be fitted into one of the many existing categories, it can be nominate ...read more

How well do we know ourselves? The fossil record of hominins, our ancestors and closest kin, is limited, and the exploration of our collective deep history through genetic analysis is still a relatively new field. Neither excavations nor lab work has been able to reconstruct, definitively, the earliest chapter of the Homo sapiens story. For decades, two competing models of human evolution have dominated the field. One claims that H. sapiens evolved in a single place, Africa, and left that conti ...read more

Six thousand, five hundred and twenty-one days: That’s how long I’d been living with my son when he left home for college. I’d spooned applesauce into his gummy mouth when he was a baby. I’d watched him wobble down the street on training wheels when he was a preschooler. I’d learned to rise on tiptoes to kiss his stubbled cheek when he was a teenager. For nearly 18 years, I’d been there for the big moments and the daily nothings. I’d fretted about him an ...read more

By the time he reached Los Angeles, Landry was scared, dazed and exhausted. Flying for the first time in his life, the 13-year-old from Cameroon was now some 8,200 miles from all things familiar. Landry, whose parents had recently died in a car crash, came to LA to live with his legal guardian. Although Aunt Delphine welcomed him warmly, Landry’s first night in America was restless. His left ankle was puffy and warm.He settled in to his new environment, attending school and studying Englis ...read more

NASA will be making history again, soon. Sometime this spring, if all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will carry the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) into space. Once in “high-Earth” orbit, the satellite’s instruments will scan the entire sky, hoping to find small planets outside our solar system. The main targets are potentially habitable worlds that are relatively nearby, within a few hundred light-years.But the mission’s scientific objectives aren ...read more

Can you hear me now? Play the video below to see if you can hear a “voice”. (Credit: YouTube/Patrick Tucker/Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program) Are you hearing voices? Say yes and many people might question your sanity. But hearing voices is exactly what the United States military hopes will happen with a weapon it’s currently developing. The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWD) is building a weapon called the Laser Induced Plasma Effect. Here’s how ...read more

An improved method for recording brain activity could prove a major asset to neuroscience, according to a Nature paper just out: Moving magnetoencephalography towards real-world applications with a wearable system The new device is an improved version of an existing technique, called magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG scanners detect magnetic fluctuations caused by the brain’s electrical activity. Existing MEG devices, however, are bulky, expensive installations, because they rely on liqui ...read more