(Credit: danm12/Shutterstock) Imagine walking through a forest near dusk. It is peaceful and quiet; the setting sun paints streaks of light through tree trunks and across your path. The scene is familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a walk in the woods.  Using one word, how would you describe the experience?  You might defer to a string of adjectives: serenity, beauty, peace, fulfillment — words that dance around the feeling without ever precisely pinning it down. ...read more

NASA scientists modeled Earth’s CO2 as it shifts through the seasons using data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. (Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio) Earth’s been around for 4.5 billion years. And during that time, our star has gotten stronger with age. Yet the planet’s climate has stayed relatively stable. That apparent contradiction recently prompted an investigation by Gavin Foster of the University of Southampton and his colleagues. The scientists ...read more

A farmer climbs into a combine. (Credit: USDA/Lance Cheung) Most people think of frost as a farmer’s worst nightmare. But for corn growers in Illinois, there’s little worse than a warm, soggy spring. Rainfall can soak soft prairie soils and rot the kernels before they can grow. If the rains keep farmers from their fields long enough, crop yields start to plummet. Rain can also wash away herbicides, pushing growers to apply more. For years, this fear has driven farmers to plant earl ...read more

The skeleton of a near-term fetus found in a Black Death-era Italian grave. (Credit D. Cesana et al 2017) For one unfortunate medieval Italian, the cradle was the grave. It’s commonly called coffin birth, though researchers use the terms post-mortem fetal extrusion or expulsion. And yes, it is what you think it is — but the latest case documented by scientists, from 14th century Liguria, reveals there was more to the story. A re-examination of a medieval grave outside Geno ...read more

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Can neuroscience help courts to decide how criminals should be punished? Is moral responsibility, or the lack of it, visible on a brain scan? In The Brain Defense (Penguin, 2017, on sale now), author Kevin Davis explores the growing use of brain images as evidence in American courtrooms. What Davis calls the “brain defense” is the strategy of using evidence of apparent brain abnormalities as a mitigating factor when defendants are convicted of violent crimes. If someone’s brai ...read more

A female seven-arm octopus carrying an egg-yolk jelly. Photo © MBARI The seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus, lives a hidden life deep in the dark depths of the oceans. These massive cephalopods—females of which can grow to be more than 12 feet long—earned the moniker for their habit of folding one of their eight arms away. What little is known of their daily lives has largely been gleaned from dead animals pulled from the sea by trawls, as inh ...read more

The mountain ridge on Iapetus has been a mystery since 2004. New simulations suggest it formed from rocky debris falling at shallow angles, which would allow for material to move down range and clump up into a continuous mountain range. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) Moons in the solar system come in many different forms. Some are boulder-sized, while one is larger than the planet Mercury. Some are mixtures of rock and iron, while others hide oceans and rocky cores under icy surface ...read more

Requisitioned from farmers, blitzed with anthrax-laden bombs in the 1940s, and made inhospitable to human and animal life for decades, the tiny Scottish island of Gruinard now serves as home to a flock of healthy sheep and a disreputable monument to the birth of biological warfare. The research conducted at Gruinard during the second World War was the very first of its kind, providing proof of concept of a natural microorganism that could be massively weaponized to inflict environmental damage a ...read more