A demonstration of the icebreaking testing taking place at the National Research Council of Canada in St. Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador. Credit: CNW Group/National Research Council Canada Imagine your childhood bathtub playtime magnified into large model ships plowing through an ice-filled tank with a length that rivals the Statue of Liberty’s height. That 300-foot ice tank in the Canadian city of St. John’s is currently helping the U.S. Coast Guard cond ...read more

Solar eclipse. Credit: Luc Viatour (CC-BY-SA) On August 21st, millions of people across the U.S. will have the opportunity to witness a total solar eclipse. But we won’t be the only ones taking notice—there is a good chance animals, and even some plants, will be affected by the event, too. It is not as farfetched as you might think. Many animals and plants respond to daily changes in light and temperature. Birds sing at dawn while fireflies come out at twilight.  Flowers like m ...read more

A collection of helminth eggs seen under a microscope. (Credit: By Jarun Ontakrai/Shutterstock) In Germany, treatments for disease may entail adding a vial of parasitic worms to a meal or beverage. The country’s food and consumer safety organization is set to weigh in on the relative merits of parasitic worms as a treatment for a range of autoimmune disorders. So called “helminthic therapies” have been slowly gaining ground in the past two decades or so, although the scientif ...read more

Over time, these cycles of bounty and absence come and go, and every place on Earth is crossed eventually. For human beings, with our limited lives and limited means of travel, these vagaries of celestial alignment mean the majority of people on Earth have never seen a total solar eclipse. The Daytime StarsThe first total solar eclipse most Americans will have ever seen begins the morning of Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, two seconds before 10:16 a.m. PDT. At that moment, the dark shadow of the moon tou ...read more

1. Is your daily slog through a non-equilibrium system of interacting particles — how physicists define vehicular traffic — getting you down? Us too, especially when it slows for no apparent reason. 2. According to a study in the New Journal of Physics, traffic jams develop spontaneously when vehicle density exceeds a critical level, beyond which minor fluctuations in the flow of individual vehicles destabilize the whole thing. 3. In fact, even construction or an accident isn’t ...read more

This August, the sky will dim until the daytime world becomes dark. The bright disk that usually lights everything, burns skin, feeds plants and tells animals when to sleep will become a blank circle, surrounded by the shifting haze of its atmosphere. This scene will pass over the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, potentially capturing an audience even larger than the Super Bowl. And these people — including you, I hope — will likely react emotionally, not scientifically. ...read more

Pot growers have turned public lands into industrial agricultural sites. And the ecosystem effects are alarming. On a hot August morning, Mourad Gabriel steps out of his pickup onto the gravel road that winds up the side of Rattlesnake Peak. Dark-bearded and muscular, the research ecologist sports a uniform of blue work clothes, sturdy boots and a floppy, Army-style camo hat. He straps on a pistol. “Just to let you know,” Gabriel says, sensitive to the impression the gun makes, ...read more

A woman suffers from digestive symptoms that wax and wane for months. What could be the root of her mysterious illness? “I’ve never seen my belly so big,” said Christina, puffing her cheeks out like a cartoon character. “It keeps bloating and bloating.” Christina, the wife of my good friend Norman, was a healthy 50-year-old who took no medications and had no chronic health issues. She had first told me about the bloating, diarrhea and stomach cramps one month e ...read more

Bacteria That Shape Blood Vessels Researchers have discovered a surprising link between gut-dwelling bacteria and the brain’s blood vessels. Cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) are capillaries that are enlarged or deformed and thin-walled, making them vulnerable to leaks — which can lead to stroke or seizure. To study these deformities, experts genetically engineered mice to form CCMs after an injection of a specialized drug. Some rodents went on to develop abdominal infections, ...read more

A neurobiologist’s legacy: rewriting how cells operate — and how they go rogue. A model of Ben Barres’ brain sits on the windowsill behind his desk at Stanford University School of Medicine. To a casual observer, there’s nothing remarkable about the plastic lump, 3-D-printed from an MRI scan. Almost lost in the jumble of papers, coffee mugs, plaques and trophies that fill the neurobiologist’s office, it offers no hint about what Barres’ actual gray matter ...read more