I’ve spent the last few days at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Seattle. What I’ve learned is that geology has definitely left the planet and there are some great questions and locations for studying geologic problems on other planets in our solar system. This got me thinking about some of my favorite geologic sites in the solar system. Some of them are like features on Earth, others are like terrestrial deposits on steroids and others are like nothing we can find ...read more

Jane Goodall at Gombe with Hugo van Lawick and his omnipresent camera. (Credit: Jane Goodall Institute) During the 1960s, humanity’s place in the universe changed dramatically as Soviet and American astronauts ventured off the planet and (for the Yanks, at least) onto the surface of the Moon. During those same years, humanity’s place on Earth changed rather dramatically, too, as scientists took a closer look at our primate relatives and discovered that they are a lot more like us&n ...read more

Never fear, self-driving snowplows are here. (Credit: Daimler, Mercedes-Benz ) We hate to break it to you, but winter is coming. And with winter comes snow, which tends to spoil people’s travel plans. But a group of self-driving snowplows could clear the tarmac faster and more efficiently, helping make winter-weather delays a thing of the past. Four autonomous Mercedes-Benz Arocs tractor’s recently hit the the tarmac at a former airbase in Germany, showcasing the tech and use-c ...read more

(Credit: Javier Lazaro) Creating shrunken heads—small, severed human heads that are widely associated with Voodoo and tribal rituals—is a gruesome process, apparently much more than what’s shown in Beetlejuice. But leave it to the animal kingdom to prove there’s a natural, less sinister way to shrink a head. Red-toothed shrews’ heads seasonally reverse sizes once they’re adults, something called the Dehnel phenomenon, which was first discovered in 1949. ...read more

A few weeks ago I blogged about the idea that high-IQ people suffer from an inability to communicate with less gifted folk. Now, a new paper claims that very intelligent people are more prone to mental illnesses and allergies. However, I don’t think the paper is very smart. Researchers Ruth I. Karpinski and colleagues surveyed the members of American Mensa, a society for people in the top 2% of IQ (IQ 130+). 3,715 Mensans responded to the survey, which asked them whether they were current ...read more

(Credit: Universal Robots) Robots toiling day and night assembling widgets and thingamabobs in pitch-black warehouses isn’t some mustache-twirling industrialist tycoon’s fantasy. It’s here, it’s the future of manufacturing, and it’s not just the multinational conglomerates that stand to benefit from the robot labor revolution. Main Street will, too. Voodoo Manufacturing, a small 3D printing farm in Brooklyn—OK, so not quite mom and pop “Main Street&rdq ...read more

By Sharon Karasick Girl Scouts are encouraged to try all sorts of new things in their scouting experience, a commitment reflected in their new motto: ”When she’s a Girl Scout, she’s also a G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-taker, Leader)™.  While many troops still embrace the traditional three c’s of crafts, camping, and cookies, Girl Scouts are also exploring new civic engagement opportunities through innovative STEM programming. On the surface, civic engag ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) “Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?” so sayeth Indiana Jones, and so, apparently, say babies too. In a study published Wednesday in Frontiers in Psychology, European neuroscientists determined that our instinctive fears of snakes and spiders are so primal, even babies become alarmed at the sight of them. How’d they figured it out? Well, they scared some babies. For science! [embedded content]Primal Fear Though not everyone is frightened of the tw ...read more

In November 2013, a four-year-old captive beluga whale moved to a new home. She had been living in a facility with other belugas. But in her new pool, the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, her only companions were dolphins. The whale adapted quickly: she started imitating the unique whistles of the dolphins, and stopped making a signature beluga call altogether. “The first appearance of the beluga in the dolphinarium caused a fright in the dolphins,” write Elena ...read more

Anthropologist Teresea Fernandez-Crespo examined megaliths, or stone burial sites, in north-central Spain to learn more about how farmers lived in the Late Neolithic. (Teresea Fernandez-Crespo) We’ve heard how great times used to be, and I don’t mean in 1950s America. For eons, our hunter-gatherer ancestors shared their spoils with one another, didn’t own much and had very little social hierarchy. Sure, it wasn’t all kumbaya and high-fives. But the fact that individuals ...read more