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
On Aug. 21, sky-gazers from around the world will converge in the United States as a total solar eclipse charts a path from Oregon to South Carolina. In between, on Casper Mountain in Wyoming, you’ll find Don Bruns with his telescope.
A retired physicist, Bruns is using the rare opportunity to test Albert Einstein's general relativity like Sir Arthur Eddington, who was the first scientist to test the theory back in 1919. At that time, Newton’s law of universal gravity was still vogu ...read more
Arctic sea ice extent in April was nearly 394,000 square miles below the long-term average — an area one-and-a-half times the size of Texas.
The Arctic's floating lid of sea ice continued to decline in April, tying the record set last year for lowest April extent.
This makes it four straight months of record lows in 2017, leaving Arctic sea ice in a precarious state as seasonal warming accelerates with the approach of summer.
According to the latest report from th ...read more
Mouse liver cells at the end of the day (left) and the end of the night (right) after they have grown. (Credit: Ueli Schibler/University of Geneva)
Among all the organs in the human body, the liver is something of a superhero. Not only does it defend our bodies against the liquid toxins we regularly ingest, it has the ability to regenerate itself, and, as new research shows, it increases its size by nearly half over the course of a day.
Working in mice, researchers in Switzerland doc ...read more
A western spotted skunk stands on its hands to deliver a smelly attack. (Credit: Jerry W. Dragoo)
As the climate changes, many species are finding that areas they once called home are becoming less and less hospitable.
These kinds of ecological shifts are natural, but they usually happen over much longer time scales, giving animals time to adapt. Today, their surroundings could shift so fast that they become premature relics in their own environments. To avert, or perhaps ease, this transition ...read more
With Cassini already preparing for a third dive between Saturn and its rings, NASA has released this spectacular movie from the first dive
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I can’t help it — I’m just enchanted by the imagery coming back from Cassini as it has been swooping through the gap between Saturn and the giant planet’s rings. The latest is the movie above, made from a sequence of rapid-fire images acquired by Cassini as it made its first dive on April 26th.
From NA ...read more
Is oxytocin really the love and trust chemical? Or is it just the hype hormone? A new paper suggests that many studies of the relationship between oxytocin and behaviors such as trust have been flawed.
The paper is a meta-analysis just published by Norwegian researchers Mathias Valstad and colleagues. Valstad et al. found that the level of oxytocin in human blood, often used as a proxy measure of brain oxytocin, has no relation to central nervous system oxytocin levels under normal conditions. ...read more
