(Credit: Shutterstock) A new male contraceptive is set to begin testing next year. Beginning in April, about 420 men will begin rubbing a hormonal gel onto their shoulders every morning, with the goal of lowering sperm counts below what’s needed to cause a pregnancy. If all goes to plan, they and their partners will spend a year relying only on the gel for birth control. Another Try The study is receiving joint funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Population ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Those of us brave souls who inhabit America’s northern climes know that it’s not the cold that brings on the winter blues. You go to work and it’s dark. You leave work and it’s dark. The sun? What’s that? Indeed, as I post this at 3:30 p.m., the sun is already nearing the horizon. The sky above is dark. Today — the Winter Solstice — the sun will set at 4:20 p.m. here in Milwaukee. But that’s actually pretty weird. It’ ...read more

I noticed the season’s first juncos hopping in my yard a few short weeks ago – an event I look forward to every year because I know their arrival here in New England means winter is on its way. And by “winter,” I mean, specifically, winter solstice – the longest night of the year, the end of six months during which the sun sets earlier and earlier every day. Like people of many cultures around the world, I celebrate the first day of winter because it marks the time ...read more

In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists confirmed that the oldest fossils ever discovered — found in a nearly 3.5-billion-year-old rock from western Australia — contain 11 complex microbes that are members of five distinct species. The findings not only suggest that life on our planet originated some 4 billion years ago, but also help support the increasingly widespread theory that life in the universe is much ...read more

(Credit: NASA) Exoplanets have dominated astronomy news so much in recent years, some people are getting sick of them. It’s funny to think that their existence has only been confirmed for 25 years. Before astronomers announced in 1992 that pulsar B1257+12 had a couple of planets in tow, the idea of planets existing beyond our solar system was just that, an idea. It made sense, but no one had ever seen any. The not-so-secret motivation behind exoplanet research nowadays is the hope of one ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Ladies, looks like we might have another thing to worry about — well, at least for those of us who play soccer. New, unpublished research, presented in November at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C., suggests female soccer players experience greater brain damage from heading the ball than men do. The injury occurs in white matter tracts — the long, branch-like nerve fibers, or axons, that extend from neurons, crisscross the bra ...read more

Dragonfly is a dual-quadcopter lander that would take advantage of the environment on Titan to fly to multiple locations, some hundreds of miles apart. (Credit: NASA) A little over once a decade, through its New Frontiers program, NASA hosts a battle-royale lottery that sets the tone for the agency’s focus on the future of exploration throughout the solar system. This year, in terms of planetary exploration, NASA decided on sending drones to Titan and a claw-machine to a familiar asteroi ...read more

(Credit: Alexander Raths/Shutterstock) The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced yesterday that it would be removing a three-year funding pause on so-called “gain-of-function” research. The type of research in question involves engineering viruses to give them capabilities not found in nature in order to facilitate research. This can be as simple as producing a higher yield for a certain vaccine strain, but has also involved giving viruses potentially dangerous traits. ...read more

Confocal laser scanning microscope image of the Cassida rubiginosa flagellum tip. (Credit: Matsumura, Kovalev, Gorb, Sci. Adv. 2017;3: eaao5469) Male beetles often have thin penises longer than their bodies. Now scientists are discovering how these insects can have sex without breaking their narrow, lengthy penises, findings that could help lead to longer, stronger catheters for use in medicine. Scientists experimented with thistle tortoise beetles, Cassida rubiginosa. The insects are about 8 ...read more

What’s going on in your computer? (Credit: Shutterstock) Nothing comes for free, especially online. Websites and apps that don’t charge you for their services are often collecting your data or bombarding you with advertising. Now some sites have found a new way to make money from you: using your computer to generate virtual currencies. Several video streaming sites and the popular file sharing network The Pirate Bay have allegedly been “cryptojacking” their users’ ...read more