The ancestors of Alaska Native people began using local copper sources to craft intricate tools roughly 1,000 years ago. Over one-third of all copper objects archaeologists have found in this region were excavated at a single spot, named the Gulkana Site.This is the site I’ve studied for the past four years as a Ph.D. student at Purdue University. In spite of its importance, the Gulkana Site is not well known.To my knowledge, it isn’t mentioned in any museums. Locals, including Alaska Native ...read more

Despite an ongoing outbreak of bird flu in dairy cows, the popularity of raw milk has only risen. Advocates claim raw milk has superior health benefits over pasteurized milk. There is little evidence to support these claims, however, and the risk of serious illness is much greater.Mississippi State University food scientists Juan Silva and Joel Komakech and nutritionist Mandy Conrad explain the difference between pasteurized and raw milk, addressing common misconceptions about the health risks a ...read more

Crocodiles have been around for a long time and lived all over the world. A fossil representing a new species of crocodile-like ancestor is the first small predatory reptile of its kind to be found in Brazil and is described in a Scientific Reports paper.The fossil, which dates back about 237 million years, predates the rise of the dinosaurs, reinforces the wide geographical distribution of crocodile-like reptiles called pseudosuchians, and represents an evolutionary link to the modern crocodile ...read more

Your heart is pounding. You’re pouring sweat. You feel like you can’t breathe. Your stomach may get into the act, too, causing nausea and/or diarrhea. You might feel lightheaded and unable to think clearly. These are all possible symptoms of what people often call an anxiety attack. The clinical term is panic attack, but whatever you call it, it’s deeply unpleasant.Episodes like these — when fear or anxiety manifest as physical symptoms — are common. Krystal Lewis, clinical psychologis ...read more

Quantum computing is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get. Quantum phenomena – the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels – are not definite, one thing or another. They are opaque clouds of possibility or, more precisely, probabilities. When someone observes a quantum system, it loses its quantum-ness and “collapses” into a definite state.Quantum phenomena are mysterious and often counterintuitive. This makes quantum co ...read more

In 1902, a Scottish novelist introduced a character who quickly became iconic. Peter Pan was a boy who could fly. He zipped between reality and an imaginary world, sometimes taking other children with him.Peter Pan was eternally a boy. He would never grow up, nor did he want to mature. Growing up would mean a loss of adventure and the burden of responsibility.Peter Pan Syndrome is now used to describe adults who struggle with accepting the responsibilities that come with adulthood. Although it� ...read more

From coexisting with dinosaurs and surviving five mass extinctions, the Cuban manjuarí fish (Atractosteus tristoechus, or Cuban gar) today faces two threats that could finally break its historical resilience: the African Walking Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) and humanity.Scientists have struggled to track its population for decades, nearly losing sight of this remarkable fish despite its notable characteristics: a cylindrical, elongated body up to 60 inches long, covered in stone-like plates.The ...read more

Move over Triceratops, there’s a new horn-faced dinosaur in town. Researchers announced the fossil of an herbivore dinosaur with one of the largest, most ornate “frills” on its skull and two blade-like horns protruding from it, in the scientific journal PeerJ. Those features inspired its name, Lokiceratops rangiformis, which means “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou.” Lokiceratops appeared at least 12 million years earlier than its famous cousin Triceratops and at 22 feet l ...read more

Back in 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a way for spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light. Instead of accelerating the spacecraft across a region of spacetime, his idea was to contract spacetime ahead of it and expand spacetime behind it. In this scenario, the spacecraft sits in a flat bubble of spacetime that experiences little acceleration.The laws of physics that govern this behavior are Einstein’s field equations for general relativity. And they are fears ...read more

Imagine keeping a laser beam trained on a dime that’s 200 miles away. Now imagine doing that continuously for 24 hours, while riding a merry-go-round. Seem difficult? Well, that’s basically what the Hubble Space Telescope does.After months of technical issues, NASA announced June 4 that Hubble would shift into one-gyroscope mode. This essentially means that the telescope will have to rely on just one of the several gyroscopes – devices that measure an object’s orientation in space – it ...read more