(Credit: John Carnemolla/Shutterstock) If you want to get something done in an African wild dog pack, you’ve got to be ready to sneeze. The animals seem to make group decisions based on a system of explosive exhalations — “sneezes” — that determine if they get up and go on the hunt. If the dogs reach a quorum of sorts, they all fall in line — no “bless you’s” necessary. Sneeze If You’re With Me Researchers from Swansea University and ...read more

Closeup look at Hurricane Irma’s eye, acquired by the GOES-16 weather satellite. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As I’m writing this on Wednesday morning, the eye of Hurricane Irma — a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm – has passed over the islands of Barbuda, Saint Barthelemy and Saint Martin, and was shortly headed for the Virgin Islands. I shudder to think what has been happening on the ground with the storm’s maximum sustained win ...read more

Photo: flickr/Kevin Dooley There are many ways to cope with being blind, from using a cane to adopting a seeing-eye dog. But some blind people have gone a step further and developed the skill of using mouth clicks to echolocate, in the same way that bats navigate in the dark. Here, a group of engineers studied exactly how these ‘human bats’ — or ‘bat men’, if you will — echolocate. They found that the clicks are very short (~3 milliseconds) and the freq ...read more

Select Category Select Tag Select Archive ...read more

Zika virus (green) preferentially targets the stem cells (red) in a human glioblastoma. (Credit: Zhu et al., 2017) Zika has largely faded from the news cycle as efforts to control the disease have taken hold and the number of new cases has dropped. Now, it’s back, not as a pending epidemic, but as a potential treatment for brain cancer. Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine and the University of California, Santa Barbara have conducted preliminary tests with the v ...read more

The Grasburg Mine in Indonesia. The pit itself is 4-km and sits near the top of Pancake Jaya. Small glaciers can be seen to the right of the mine. NASA Earth Observatory. Who owns the land beneath your feet? That might seem like a simple question, but what about the stuff beneath the surface? The rocks and minerals … and resources? Who owns those items of potential value and who gets the profits if that resource is exploited? These questions have existed for centuries and are still being ...read more

Smoke from the fires appears to have blown all the way across North America and more than half way across the Atlantic Smoke and heat from raging wildfires in Idaho and Montana are seen in this animation of satellite images acquired on Sept. 3, 2017. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As of this afternoon, 77 large fires are burning across 1.4 million acres in eight western U.S. states. That’s an area more than three times the size of Houston. The burning is part of a long-term trend of incr ...read more

Dating of Neanderthals gone awry? Remains of our hominin cousins previously found in Croatia’s Vindija Cave return to the spotlight with new research that claims earlier studies got their age very wrong. (Credit Ivor Karavani) With every new find, our understanding of the twilight of the Neanderthals, our nearest hominin kin, advances. Or not. New research on some of the most famous Neanderthal fossils, from Croatia’s Vindija Cave, suggest earlier analysis about their age ...read more

Security experts are both thrilled and anxious about the internet of things (IoT), the ever-growing collection of smart electronic gadgets that interact with the world around them. It includes devices like internet-connected garage door openers, refrigerators you can text to see if you’re low on milk and tennis rackets that offer tips on a better backhand — even smart sex toys. The technology research firm Gartner estimates that 6.4 billion such IoT devices were connected online in ...read more