Shake map of the September 19, 2017 earthquake in Mexico. USGS. For the second time this month, a large earthquake has struck Mexico. Unlike the M8.1 earthquake that occurred off the Pacific coast and far from Mexico City, this one was located under central Mexico and only ~150 kilometers from the massive Mexican capitol. This new earthquake was a M7.1 that located ~51 kilometers beneath the surface. That will hopefully help dampen some of the potential damage as over 8.5 million people live wit ...read more

A gloomy octopus (Credit: Sylke Rohrlach/Wikimedia Commons) Underneath the waves lies a lost city, home to untold riches and guarded jealously by the strange creatures who make their homes within its confines. Well, the riches are all shellfish, but “Octlantis,” a newly discovered settlement inhabited by around a dozen common Sydney octopuses, does have some strange residents. Tale of Two Cities Octopuses were once considered solitary creatures, thought to roam the depths alon ...read more

That blood flew for three hours inside a climate-controlled container that was attached to a drone. But why would blood even travel that long via drone, anyways? (Credit: Medical Drones, Vimeo) Drone delivery is sexy. We’ve seen Domino’s pizza and 7-11 Slurpees dropped by drone. And then there are drones delivering something every human needs to live: blood. Timothy Amukele, a pathologist with Johns Hopkins University, and his team flew a drone for three hours with blood samples as ...read more

This artist’s impression shows the exoplanet WASP-12b — an alien world as black as fresh asphalt. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)) An exoplanet twice the size of Jupiter is hot, egg-shaped and coal-black. Wasp-12b orbits around a Sun-like star some 1,400 light-years away. It makes a complete orbit around its sun in just 24 hours because it lies so close to its star, and the proximity pushes the temperature to around 4,700 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so hot that mol ...read more

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(Credit: Shutterstock) The “cat lady” may be more than just a stereotype. After investigating roughly 30 people who collected nearly 1,400 animals total in southern Brazil, researchers now suggest that such men and women are afflicted with what they called animal hoarding disorder—not to be lumped in with object hoarding. The first scientific reports of people living with an excessive number of animals first appeared in 1981. Animal hoarding is currently thought of a variant ...read more

This man sleeps well. (Credit Shutterstock) Not all science needs to be so serious. Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony has proven that the best scientific research can sometimes be a mix of impactful and irreverent. Let’s check out this year’s winners, broken down by scientific category. Physics: “On the Rheology of Cats“ Cat owners are familiar with the peculiar quality of felines to fill whatever vessel they occupy, much like a liquid. So it’s only appropri ...read more

“The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time”, according to a new paper just out. Swedish researchers Pontus Plaven-Sigray and colleagues say that scientists today use longer and more complex words than those of the past, making their writing harder to read. But what does it mean? Here’s the key result. This image shows text readability metrics from 709,577 abstracts, drawn from 123 biomedical journals, published in English between 1881 and 2015. There’s ...read more

Enceladus setting behind Saturn, as seen on September 13. This is one of the final images from Cassini. Data from the mission revealed that Enceladus has an ice-covered ocean that could potentially support life. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) The death of the Cassini spacecraft marked the end of an era–not just the end of a mission, but the end of a whole style of exploration. Cassini was a multi-billion dollar probe, a versatile scout in the style of the Voyager and Galileo probes. It brist ...read more