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Marshes, streams and lakes lie alongside many of the roads and highways that zigzag across North America. Plants and animals inhabit these water bodies and can be exposed to many of the substances we put on those roads, including road salt.
Rock salt helps keep roads safe when winter storms hit, reducing winter road accidents. But it can also have serious, negative effects on aquatic ecosystems.
At high concentrations, salt can be fatal to some aquatic animals. Salt can ...read more
Two neutron stars collide; the resulting gravitational wave spread at the speed of light. (Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonne)
The dead cores of two stars collided 130 million years ago in a galaxy somewhat far away.
The collision was so extreme that it caused a wrinkle in space-time — a gravitational wave. That gravitational wave and the light from the stellar explosion traveled together across the cosmos. They arrived at Earth simultaneously at ...read more
Sure, this is supposed to be Isla Nublar, but I’m pretty sure this is a valley on the big island of Hawaii. A shot from the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom trailer.
First off, don’t get me wrong, I love crazy geo-related films. I’m not going to pull a Neil DeGrasse Tyson here and take all the fun out of a movie because it is horribly, fantastically wrong when it comes to the science … but maybe we need to have a few words about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
The first t ...read more
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Well, that’s it.
Pack it in, boys.
Show’s over for us as a species: We’ve peaked.
At least, we might have, according to a paper in Frontiers in Physiology. If anything, it looks like we might be going downhill, with climate change and other environmental effects taking our bodies away from their current idealized forms.
Fastest, Highest, Strongest
First, the findings themselves. In the paper, “Are We Reaching the Limits of Homo Sapiens?”, th ...read more
A second animation shows the giant smoke plume from the Thomas Fire illuminated by this week’s supermoon as it streams over the Pacific
This animation of infrared images shows the rapid development of SoCal wildfires driven by strong Santa Ana winds starting on the evening of Dec. 4th, continuing overnight and into the next day. Heat from the fires is highlighted with black, yellow and red pixels. Please click on the image to watch the animation. (Source: Cooperative Institute f ...read more
Photo:flickr/Petras Gagilas
We’ve all been there: waiting at the bar, dying for a drink, but unable to catch the bartender’s attention. It’s easy to assume that we are being served (or rather, ignored) by a crappy bartender. But maybe it’s us. Maybe we’re the ones not giving the right signals that say “Beer me! Now!”. This is actually the best-case scenario, because it’s fixable, and these German scientists are here to help (and, eventually, ...read more
A new optical illusion has been discovered, and it’s really quite striking. The strange effect is called the ‘curvature blindness’ illusion, and it’s described in a new paper from psychologist Kohske Takahashi of Chukyo University, Japan.
Here’s an example of the illusion:
A series of wavy horizontal lines are shown. All of the lines have exactly the same shape – a sine curve. However, half of the lines appear to have a much more triangular, “zig-z ...read more
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Researchers found that thousands of potentially usable kidneys have gone to waste across the United States in recent years, leaving many patients waiting unnecessarily for transplants.
The study, published Thursday in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, highlights inefficiencies in the transplant system. According to data collected over the past 15 years, in roughly 7,600 unilateral kidney transplants—those in which one kidney was used and on ...read more
A meeting of minds between Dian Fossey and one of the mountain gorillas she was studying (or the other way around?). Credit: ROBERT I.M. CAMPBELL
What would happen if we found an intelligent alien civilization that was less advanced than our own? I posed this as a hypothetical question in a recent blog post. But really, it doesn’t need to be posed as a hypothetical. The answer is playing out right now in the forests of Africa, and it doesn’t reflect very well on us.
The gorillas of ...read more
