Naming objects and the features that cover them help astronomers to characterize, understand, and communicate about the subjects of their studies. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has recently released official names for seven features on the planet Mercury, as well as 12 on the largest moon of Pluto, Charon. On April 6, the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature released its approved names for seven faculae on Mercury. Faculae are bright surface features th ...read more

We've all heard of sweating bullets, but this is something else entirely. A medical case report from Italian researchers last year details a 21-year-old patient who began mysteriously sweating blood from her face and palms. The condition had been ongoing for about three years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports, when she decided to check herself into a hospital — needless to say, the doctors were perplexed. Bloody, But Fine Strangely, the young woman was otherwise totally ...read more

These days it's hard to find a place on Earth where humans haven't interfered in some way. Venture to the most remote jungle or the depths of the Mariana Trench and you've likely been preceded by some emissary of humanity, whether that's chemicals carried on the wind or something more tangible. But there are places where our long shadow has never reached, where the events of the past 100,000 years might as well have never happened. Locked deep below gargantuan sheets of ice thous ...read more

When you picture the rugged coastlines of Norway, tropical heat probably doesn't come to mind, but it should. Even in the country’s Arctic reaches, the coast is typically free from ice and snow, and the weather is often more Seattle than Anchorage. How can that be? Residents can thank the Gulf Stream, an ocean conveyor belt that pushes warm water their way from the tropics. And Northern Europeans aren’t the only ones who should be thankful, either. Much of Europe and the east coast ...read more

Are you interested in citizen science? Are you looking for new ways to engage with your community members, and would you like to encourage science discovery with more of your users? If you answered yes to any of the above, then check out this exciting recorded webinar featuring Darlene Cavalier, professor of practice at Arizona State University and the founder of SciStarter, a citizen science database and platform. Darlene describes several citizen science projects in public libraries in Ar ...read more

You are what you eat. And if you're one of the apex predators that populated an unusual ecosystem 100 million years ago, researchers can determine both your meal plan and how your local food chain got so top heavy with giant carnivores, including dinosaurs and crocs. Paleontologists have long puzzled over why the ancient river systems of North Africa were home to multiple apex predators. A new study provides a meaty answer, though there's something fishy about its data on Sp ...read more

Few things get armchair paleontologists as excited as the phrase "soft tissue preservation." But a new study is casting doubt on some of the most stunning of these finds: Researchers argue that claims of brains, nerves and blood vessels preserved in animals for 520 million years are just a bunch of microbial goo called biofilm. For the last decade, researchers working in Southern China have described a number of fossils from Stage 3 of the Cambrian Period, more than 500 mil ...read more

A tiny chip implanted just under the skin could be the Breathalyzer of the future. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego reported today that they had created a tiny chip that can read levels of alcohol in the body and relay that information to a smartwatch. It could be an alternative to traditional means of detecting whether someone has been drinking, and offers users the ability to monitor their blood-alcohol levels in real-time. The chip, which hasn't been tested i ...read more

The internet is clearly still a wild frontier. We are bombarded by sensationalist or fake news all the time, sometimes by sources who merely want to increase traffic and sometimes by people who intentionally want to deceive. It is a challenge even for the seasoned professional to figure out what is trustworthy information and what is merely conjecture, rumors and downright lies. So when news about geologic events moves from the realm of the researcher to the media, what happens when the scie ...read more

Two independent studies show how much we need to limit warming to preserve the ice. But we're currently headed on a very different path. Almost every month now we get news of dramatic losses of Arctic sea ice due to human-caused warming — and last month was no exception. The ice extent in March 2018 turned out to be the second lowest for the month in the satellite record. The best estimates are that unless we significantly reduce our emissions of planet-war ...read more