(Credit: Gallinago_media/Shutterstock) If you’re an uptown rat, you don’t associate with the downtown kind. Segregation is real if you’re a rat in New York City, though likely for more prosaic reasons than in their human counterparts. A recent genetic study of NYC rats found unique populations living in uptown and downtown Manhattan, indicating that they probably don’t interact with each other all that much.  City of Rats The project is the work of Fordham Uni ...read more

Map of the moon engraved by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, 1645. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) People have been dreaming about space travel for hundreds of years, long before the arrival of the spectacular technologies behind space exploration today – mighty engines roaring fire and thunder, shiny metal shapes gliding in the vastness of the universe. We’ve only traveled into space in the last century, but humanity’s desire to reach the moon is far from recent. In the second c ...read more

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British tanks on training manoeuvres, in France, during World War I. This photograph of an advancing tank dwarfing British troops, gives an idea of the scale of tanks, and the power they brought to the front line in the last years of the war. The earliest models of tank were slow and excessively heavy, and struggled on wet ground, but later models were much more effective. Credit: National Library of Scotland | Tom Aitken When the first tanks appeared on the battlefields of World War I, journa ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) When sedans outnumber pickup trucks, chances are the community votes Democrat. When pickup trucks rule, the community leans Republican. What you drive matters, at least when it comes to revealing the nuts and bolts of American demographics. That’s the assertion by researchers in a paper published in November in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For thousands of years, authorities have conducted surveys to determine the demographic of ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) During sex, the heart races, blood pressure rises and the breath quickens, sometimes to a pant. Muscles tense and euphoric feelings flood the brain. This is not a time to be thinking, “I hope my heart doesn’t stop.” But according to cardiologists, male patients over 50 during checkups sometimes ask what the chance is of a heart attack or sudden cardiac arrest during sexual intercourse. The concern is based on the heightened physiology experienced (racin ...read more

Having your children trail you like ducklings in a pond sounds pretty good to human parents, who are stuck carrying or pushing their offspring through toddlerhood. But some animals with mobile babies choose to carry them anyway. One scientist looked at waterbirds to figure out why certain species find it worthwhile to haul their kids around, while others leave them to paddle alone. The reasons he found range from snuggle time to murderous fish. Animals including a ...read more

Sometimes, scientific misconduct is so blatant as to be comical. I recently came across an example of this on Twitter. The following is an image from a paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C: As pointed out on PubPeer, this image – which is supposed to be an electron microscope image of some carbon dot (CD) nanoparticles – is an obvious fake. The “dots” are identical, and have clearly been cut-and-pasted. Where one copy has been placed over the top of an ...read more