(Credit: Shutterstock)
It seems impossible, right? We have been taught from the time we were young that babies are made when a sperm and an egg come together, and the DNA from these two cells combine to make a unique individual with half the DNA from the mother and half from the father. So how can there be a third person involved in this process?
To understand the idea of three-parent babies, we have to talk about DNA. Most people are familiar with the double helix-style DNA which make up the 2 ...read more
Yesterday, we started the 2018 Geology World Cup with voting for Group A, so let’s move to the next group!
Group B
Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Wikimedia Commons.
Morocco: Much of Morocco’s geology is linked with the slow collision of Africa and Europe. The Atlas Mountains rise up on the western side of Africa and represent the the stresses put on the two plates by Africa plowing into Europe over the last 65 million years. The mountain range that pre-da ...read more
2018 Geology World Cup
The 2018 World Cup starts today! One of the world’s largest events of any kind will capture the planet’s attention yet again and Rocky Planet will be hosting the first Geology World Cup. Back in 2014, I ran the Volcano World Cup, where I pit each country that qualified for the real World Cup against each other based on their volcanic features and history. You, the reader, got to vote on which country moved on each round until we crown ...read more
An annotated map showing the Milky Way’s structure, based on measurements to distant stars and other objects. (Credit: NASA)
Despite residing in it, it’s hard for us to know exactly how big the Milky Way is. But new research has found that our galaxy is bigger than previously thought. Using a large survey of stars instead of just models (as previous researchers did), astronomers have now determined the disk of our galaxy to be 200,000 light-years across &ac ...read more
One of four frogs preserved in amber for nearly 100 million years and formally described today in Scientific Reports. (Credit Lida Xing)
Frogs in a rainforest? Sure, rainforests are home to tons of them. Nothing new there — except that researchers just found four, preserved in amber and nearly 100 million years old, that suggest frogs have been hanging out in that environment much longer than previously shown.
Anura, the amphibian order that includes frogs and toads ...read more
We’re around magnets so much, it’s easy to forget they’re kind of magic. Not only do magnets make for fun toys, they can attract or repel objects from a distance through an invisible force, they can create electricity (and vice versa) and they can make cool new tools and materials possible.
A team of mechanical engineers from MIT and the New Jersey Institute of Technology has gone down that last path, publishing in Nature today a new ...read more
Crevasses near the grounding line of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. (Credit: Ian Joughin, University of Washington)
Some 3 trillion tons of ice has melted from Antarctica since 1992, and there’s not much time to change course. That’s according to a sweeping group of studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature that looks at the past, present and future of Antarctic ice sheets.
Scientists are calling it the most complete picture ever of ice loss on th ...read more
