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Marcus is the world’s strongest storm so far in 2018[embedded content] After strengthening into the year’s first Category 5 storm, Tropical Cyclone Marcus has weakened. At it strongest, the storm attained maximum sustained winds of 160 miles per hour as it swirled off the northwestern coast of Australia on Wednesday. As I’m writing this on Thursday (Friday morning in Australia), Marcus has settled down to 120 mph, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It ...read more

Cherenkov radiation glowing in the core of the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. (Credit: Argonne National Laboratory) When we hear the word “radiation,” we tend to think of atomic bombs (like the ones that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), or environmental mishaps like the three-eyed fish living outside Springfield’s nuclear power plant on The Simpsons. But radiation – a term that refers to the transmission of energy through waves and particles – ...read more

On Twitter, I learned about a curious new paper in Scientific Reports: Long-Term Study of Heart Rate Variability Responses to Changes in the Solar and Geomagnetic Environment by Abdullah Alabdulgader and colleagues. According to this article, the human heart “responds to changes in geomagnetic and solar activity”. This paper claims that things like solar flares, cosmic rays and sunspots affect the beating of our hearts. Spoiler warning: I don’t think this is true. In fact, I t ...read more

An artist’s illustration of Scholz’s star. (Credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester) When ‘Oumuamua passed by our neck of the woods last fall, it got everyone talking. Sure, some of your Facebook friends were likely eager to speculate on the rock’s possibly extraterrestrial origins. But as the first known interstellar visitor, it got scientists curious too. Maybe there are other intergalactic interlopers among us? Perhaps it would be possible to study the orbits ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Inside a dog’s furry head are millions of neurons firing away, passing chemicals to one another and generating thoughts. We may guess at what our canine pals are thinking about: food, a walk, their loving owners. But for all the time humans spend interacting with dogs, their thoughts largely elude us, and it’s easy to see why: dogs can’t speak their minds (at least in any language we know). But we still are curious about our best bud’s mindset, an ...read more

Mischaracterized as the “Atacama Alien,” a mummified skeleton from Chile that’s only six inches long has inspired numerous theories. DNA-based research out today explains the appearance of this unfortunate — and very human — individual. (Credit Bhattacharya S et al. 2018) Smaller than a Barbie doll, with an elongated skull and other anomalies, the mummified skeleton known as “Ata” was found in an abandoned mining town in Chile’s Atacama Desert in ...read more

An Uber self-driving car prototype on the road. Credit: Uber A self-driving Uber accident that killed a homeless woman represents a somber milestone in the development of self-driving car technologies. Now a video of the accident may raise more questions about why the Uber vehicle failed to react to the woman and thereby claimed the life of the first pedestrian victim in self-driving car history. The video released by police shows two views of the accident that took place in Temp ...read more

The MEG helmet. (Credit: Wellcome) When it comes to observing the inner workings of our brains, there are a few ways we can do it. But, for most, bulky machines and carefully controlled environments are the norm. The traditional trade-off researchers face for a glimpse inside the mind is a mind that’s constrained in some fairly unnatural ways. It can make doing research on how the brain works during basic human activities difficult. Researchers from the U.K., however, have found a better ...read more

Human-caused warming is popping the frozen corks that normally bottle up thick sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, allowing it to pour south NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these two views of different sea ice conditions over the Lincoln Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Breakup here happened much earlier than usual in 2017, allowing huge volumes of thick sea ice to pour south through a narrow passage and ultimately into the North Atlantic Ocean. (Image ...read more