When the Soyuz spacecraft returns from the ISS, a parachute slows it's fall, but not enough for a safe landing. That's why there are retrorockets on board that fire just moments before touchdown; they slow the spacecraft that extra little bit so the landing is slow and survivable for the crew. It works, but it seems a little counter-intuitive if you think about it. When NASA had capsule-type vehicles in the 1960s -- the same kind its revisiting now with Orion and SpaceX is using with t ...read more

Nectar-drinking bats possess hairy tongues, and now scientists reveal these hairs are designed to maximize how much sweet nectar the bats can guzzle. The South American Pallas' long-tongued bat, Glossophaga soricina, dips its long tongue in and out of flowers while hovering in mid-air, and the hairs on its tongue apparently helping it collect nectar that pools at the bottom of the blossoms. Other animals, such as honeybees and mouse-like marsupials, known as honey possums, native to Austr ...read more

Earth’s worst day happened 66.043 million years ago — give or take 32,000 years. Let’s say it was a Monday. And if it was, then around Friday afternoon a strange new star would’ve begun growing brighter and brighter in the sky. Tragically, it wasn’t a cool new star at all. It was a Mount Everest-sized space rock traveling 45,000 mph. Surprise! The asteroid was so gargantuan, that as its leading edge plunged into the Gulf of Mexico, you would have seen the other sid ...read more

It's a lizard! It is my distinct pleasure to welcome Sitana attenboroughii, Attenborough's fan-throated lizard to the world. Measuring somewhere under three inches from snout to vent, the lizard is a welcome addition to the Agamidae family, and bears the "Attenborough" distinction proudly. In lieu of gifts, we are instead asking that you simply be nice to the environment. These little guys live in a fragile habitat. S. attenboroughii was just described in the January issue of Zo ...read more

Discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy exceed 3,700 to date, but if that’s not enough for you, astronomers are now probing outside of the Milky Way to find exoplanets in other galaxies. A group of researchers at the University of Oklahoma has just announced the discovery of a large population of free-floating planets in a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away. Their results were published February 2 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The researchers used a method known as ...read more

The largest eruption in the past million years was at Toba in Indonesia. How big was it? It erupted over 3000 cubic kilometers of volcanic debris. 3000 cubic kilometers! That would pave the entirety of Rhode Island in a kilometer keep of ash, rocks, and pumice. It would take roughly 300 Pinatubo-scale eruptions to match that. The eruption itself created a caldera formed when the land collapsed when all that material erupted that spans 100 kilometers from end to end and 30 kilometers fr ...read more

Most plants are sneaky. You think they're staying put, until one morning when you wake up to find your houseplant bent toward the window, or a vine that's clambered up your fence. But other plants operate more quickly. They close up their leaves at a touch, or fling their pollen onto a bee. Researchers discovered a previously unknown bit of plant acrobatics in Costa Rica. There, a flower works like a jack-in-the-box to shove its stamens into a hummingbird's face. Dust ...read more

A brief letter in Nature got me thinking this week: Don’t belittle junior researchers in meetings Anand Kumar Sharma writes to urge scientists not to grill their junior colleagues at conferences: The most interesting part of a scientific seminar, colloquium or conference for me is the question and answer session. However, I find it upsetting to witness the unnecessarily hard time that is increasingly given to junior presenters at such meetings. As inquisitive scientists, we do not ha ...read more

We're about a month away from the 60th annual rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater Texas. The event proudly calls itself the world's largest—and for good reason. Last year, nearly 8,000 lbs of snakes were killed in this barbaric slaughterfest. But there are so many reasons why this all-out assault on Texas' reptiles is a terrible idea. Rattlesnakes have complex social lives, can live for decades, and are essential to their native ecosystems. As predators, they help keep po ...read more

Image: Flickr/Tax Credits Urban legend has it that “all” of our paper currency is tainted with cocaine. These scientists decided to test whether this is true, and if so, how much of the drug is there. By testing over four thousand bills of various denominations gathered from 90 locations over more than a decade, they estimate that the “average” bill carries only 2.34 ng of cocaine (a tiny, tiny amount), but any given bill has ~15% chance of having more than 20 ...read more