Did the soothing sounds of lullabies evolve out of an arms race? ...read more

When it all lines up just right. ...read more

Rare Earthquakes Within Tectonic Plates Are Highly Deadly New Jersey Coast: Before and After Sandy Finally, a Home Where You Can Enjoy the Post-Apocalypse The Colorado Deluge CO2 ‘Time Bomb’ From Thawing Permafrost More Like Slow Leak 97. Seismologists Convicted for Failed Quake Prediction Iceland Eruption, Largest for a Century, Shows No Signs of Stopping Hurricanes with Female Names Are Deadlier Than Masculine Ones Solving the Mystery ...read more

With a series of papers out today, Homo naledi gets both a birthdate and more complete. Discovered in a South African cave, H. naledi first came to light in 2015, in a paper by University of the Witwatersrand anthropologist Lee Berger. Though the remains were undated at the time, estimates put them at anywhere from 100,000 to several million years old. This was based on a physical analysis of the bones, which contained a curious mixture of modern and archaic traits. Now, aft ...read more

The filagree of atmospheric patterns at Jupiter's south pole bears an eerie resemblance to a phenomenon here on Earth When I spotted this image of Jupiter on NASA's website, I felt a bit disoriented. At first glance, it looked like a fanciful artist's conception of the giant planet. But it's actually a real image of Jupiter's south polar region, acquired by the Juno spacecraft. (Make sure to click on it, and then click again to enlarge it.) The image has been enhanced to help bring ...read more

A new paper in the prestigious journal PNAS contains a rather glaring blooper. The paper, from Oxford University researchers Eiluned Pearce et al., is about the relationship between genes and social behaviour. The blooper is right there in the abstract, which states that "three neuropeptides (β-endorphin, oxytocin, and dopamine) play particularly important roles" in human sociality. But dopamine is not a neuropeptide. Neither are serotonin or testosterone, but throughout the paper, Pea ...read more

Amazon and Google's dreams of delivery drones dropping off packages or pizza still face the problem of short delivery ranges. Most drones have limited battery life that restricts their services to less than a 10-mile delivery radius. A recently-approved IBM patent offers an unusual way to extend delivery ranges by having drones transfer packages in midair. The IBM patent envisions several possible ways for delivery drones to hand off their packages without having to land. One ide ...read more

An 80-mile crack is spreading across the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf. And once that crack reaches the ocean, it will calve an iceberg the size of Delaware. The chunk looked like it could break off a few months ago, but it’s still clinging on by a roughly 10-mile thread. Earlier this week, scientists from the MIDAS project, which monitors Larsen C, reported a new branch on that crack. Icebergs naturally calve from ice shelves all the time. But scientists are concerned th ...read more

A paper just published in Nature Human Behaviour makes some big claims about the brain. It's called Evidence for a large-scale brain system supporting allostasis and interoception in humans, but how much is evidence and how much is speculation? The authors, Ian R. Kleckner and colleagues of Northeastern University, argue that a core function of the brain is allostasis, which they define as the process by which the brain "efficiently maintains energy regulation in the body". Allostasis ent ...read more