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Poor fella. (Credit: Dmitry A/Shutterstock) Scientists aren’t always considered to be the most festive group of people. But The British Medical Journal does its part to celebrate the spirit of the holidays with its annual Christmas issue. Once a year, the journal opens submissions for studies with a slightly lighter tone, but just as much science. The key to inclusion in the Christmas issue is originality and clever ideas — not bad science. “While we welcome light-h ...read more

Apollo 11 leaving the Earth. NASA. Within 10 minutes of a Saturn V launch, the first two stages had fallen away as the spacecraft settled into Earth orbit. Within another 10 minutes, both stages had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. They weren’t recovered for reuse; their jobs were done before the half hour mark on any lunar flight. But the third stage of the Saturn V lived on, following crews all the way to the Moon. Once there is was also left to crash, but this time it was sma ...read more

What is this, a “Euthanasia Coaster” for ants? (Credit: Julijonas Urbonas) I have a friend who loves roller coasters. He once told me, a fellow coaster-head, “You ever get the feeling that most people say they like roller coasters, but then when they’re in a park they just ride one or two of them and call it a day?” I nodded in the shared sentiment. All of that said, there’s at least one roller coaster that I, or my friend, am not interested in trying out: t ...read more

(Credit: YouTube/Adam Fish) The eruption of the Agung volcano in Bali, Indonesia has been devastating, particularly for the 55,000 local people who have had to leave their homes and move into shelters. It has also played havoc with the flights in and out of the island, leaving people stranded while the experts try to work out what the volcano will do next. But this has been a fascinating time for scholars like me who investigate the use of drones in social justice, environmental activism and cr ...read more

The eruption of Agung on November 27, 2017. Michael W. Ishak / Wikimedia Commons. Monitoring volcanoes is really hard. Not only are you trying to deduce what a volcano is going to do using context clues like earthquakes, gas emissions and deformation, but once an eruption starts, trying to get a peak at what is coming out at the vent is downright dangerous. New technology like drones and satellites have allowed us to more clearly see what is happening where we couldn’t before, and these ne ...read more

A scene from the short documentary film “Nazi VR” that tells of how a virtual recreation of Auschwitz helped convict a Nazi war criminal. Credit: MEL Films During World War II, Reinhold Hanning served as a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people were killed by Nazi Germany. More than 70 years later, a virtual recreation of Auschwitz helped German prosecutors convict Hanning of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 peopl ...read more

(Credit: kazuend/Unsplash) Climate change seems inevitable. Between the still-accelerating pace of greenhouse gas emissions and the voices of global warming deniers, hitting the targets laid out in the Paris Accord to slow the pace of a warming climate feels increasingly elusive. To hit even the 2 degree Celsius cap on a global temperature increase, emissions would need to peak in 2020, or less than three years from now, and keep going down after that. We could do it, but w ...read more

The peer-reviewed report involving 85 scientists finds that the Arctic environmental system has reached a “new normal” An iceberg off the west coast of Greenland. A new report finds that Arctic warming continues to drive declines in sea ice and ice sheets. (Photo courtesy of Greenland Travel) It’s a common refrain doubters of human-caused global warming: Temperatures now are no higher than they were during the Medieval Warm Period from about  ...read more