In this cruel world, it's impossible to navigate from cradle to grave without experiencing the bitter fruits of injustice. But bitter fruits, it turns out, are better shared. According to findings from a study published Monday in the journal JNeurosci, punishing the wrongdoer seems to be more rewarding than helping out the victim. The participants, 53 males (a bit skewed, I'd say), all played a two-player game designed to analyze how people perceive and respond to a thief. Each player — t ...read more

Today, Indonesia's Sinabung had its biggest blast in its nearly 5 years of eruptions. I reported on the initial reports of the blast and now we have some pretty stunning images from space on the eruption. It really captures the power of the blast and how the ash spread mainly to the north over Sumatra (rather than the west as predicted). Sinabung appears to have settled down since the explosion, but with this change of character, volcanologists will be looking for signs if this change will b ...read more

Scott and Mark Kelly are identical twin brothers. Though that alone does not make them unique, what does is the fact that they are also both astronauts. In order to take advantage of the Kellys’ unique situation, NASA scientists decided to conduct a detailed study on the twins, aimed at unraveling how nature versus nurture plays out in space. As part of NASA's Twins Study, researchers collected biological samples from each of the Kellys before sending Scott to the International Space ...read more

In the wake of the Valentine’s Day shooting at a Broward County, Florida high school, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media. Florida lawmaker Jared Moskowitz made the connection the day after the shooting, saying the gunman “was prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game.” In January, after two students were killed and many others wounded by a 15-ye ...read more

Sinabung has been erupting for almost 5 years now, mostly producing moderate explosions that generate pyroclastic flows. These flows roar down the slopes of the volcano -- sometimes catching people in their paths. On February 19, 2018, the volcano decided to change its tune and unleashed a massive explosion that potentially reached 55,000 feet (~16.5 kilometers), making it the largest eruption since the volcano became active again in 2013. ⚠️VIDEO | Impactante Grabación de l ...read more

Meanwhile, ice losses elsewhere allowed a Russian tanker to make the first winter crossing of the Arctic — without an icebreaker The Bering Sea off Alaska's west coast has just experienced a shocking loss of ice over a 10-day period — in winter. See the graph below for the details. To my eye it looks like sea ice extent declined from about 420,000 square kilometers on Feb. 6 to about 260,000 square kilometers on the 16th. That's a drop of 38 percent (and an area ...read more

By: Hope Henderson Through the atrium of an Oakland, CA community center, and down a narrow, paint-spattered hallway, sits Counter Culture Labs (CCL). This bocce-ball-court-turned-research-laboratory has been the east bay home for citizen science and biohacking since 2012. Ongoing projects at CCL include the Real Vegan Cheese project, which is programming yeast to produce milk proteins that can be turned into “real” cheese. Open Insulin aims to develop an open source protocol to pr ...read more

Writing in the journal Medical Care, researcher Lisa I. Iezzoni says that a peer reviewer on a paper she previously submitted to that journal displayed "explicitly disparaging language and erroneous derogatory assumptions" about disabled people. Iezzoni's paper, which was eventually rejected, was about a survey of Massachusetts Medicaid recipients with either serious mental illness or significant physical disability. The survey involved a questionnaire asking about their experiences w ...read more

When we talk about spaceflight -- modern or vintage, manned or unmanned, orbital or deep space -- launch vehicles all serve the same purpose: overcome gravity and get the payload off the Earth. Whatever the mission, it starts with a rocket launch. Even, because I can hear you asking about it, payloads that were launched from the payload bay of the space shuttle; that payload got to orbit via a shuttle launch. And because all rockets harness the same technology, they all share one common ele ...read more

Hurricane Maria, it’s safe to say, was devastating to Puerto Rico. More than five months ago, on September 20th, the Category 4 storm ravaged the U.S. territory, causing $90 billion worth of damage in some estimates and scores of deaths. Much of the island is still without power. As someone born and raised on the island (despite my gringo name), it’s been hard to watch, and keeping in touch with family still there has been difficult, especially right after the storm. But part of wha ...read more