During the Apollo missions, astronauts faced challenges from sharp, fine particles of lunar dust that clung to nearly everything, posing potential health risks while causing instrument malfunctions and allergy-like symptoms. As the space sector prepares for future Mars missions, astronauts and researchers are investigating how Mars dust may impact astronauts and their equipment. Mars, the Toxic Beach Justin Wang, a medical student at the University of Southern California, has a background in p ...read more

There’s a lot that goes on inside our brains. But there are times that our minds go… well… what’s the word? Blank? Reviewing available research on mind blanking, a new article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences says that the moments in which we are “thinking about nothing” are actually a lot more complex than we might think, as they tend to correspond with physiological, neural, and cognitive changes in our brains and bodies. Taken as a whole, the new article suggests that the blanking ...read more

Meteorites carry clues that are pivotal in exploring the history of our Solar System, yet they don’t all look the same after impact. Colliding with a planetary surface sends shockwaves through meteorites, changing their configuration in various ways. Scientists noticed, though, that meteorites containing carbon often appear as if they experienced less intense impacts and look less “shocked” than meteorites without carbon. A new study has discovered that this is because evidence from these ...read more

When it comes to bonobo hierarchy, the ladies stick together. New research out of the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior finds that female bonobos team up to keep male bonobos in line, even though the males are larger and stronger than the females. This type of social structure is uncommon among social mammals in the animal kingdom, and researchers now have a better understanding of why, according to a new study published in Communications Biology. Bonobos: Queens of the JungleAccording ...read more

It can be difficult to understand quantum mechanics. That’s okay, because, in the early days of the Internet, few could understand how that worked. Now, new developments in quantum communication may turbocharge just how quickly and securely information is delivered among us. Scientists demonstrated that such a system could work on our existing telecommunications infrastructure, they report in the journal Nature Communication.This is kind of a big deal, because many physicists had thought that ...read more

Over the past two decades, a troubling pattern has emerged: more young adults are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer — a disease traditionally seen in people over 50. If this trend continues, early-onset colorectal cancer could become the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among young adults within just five years.What's causing this surge remains unclear. With few genetic links and no consistent risk factors like obesity to blame, scientists have started looking beyond lifestyle and g ...read more

The most powerful instrument of its kind has now taken its first picture of the sun. Although the Inouye Solar Telescope began operating from its perch on the Hawaiian volcano Haleakala in 2022, the addition of its latest key piece of equipment provides a major boost to its spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution to the most powerful telescope of its kind in the world. This will increase its ability to visualize eruptions on the sun’s surface. Those storms hurl particles and radiation into ...read more

It’s one hell of an old ant. Researchers discovered a 113-million-year-old hell ant preserved in a chunk of Brazilian limestone. The find earned it the title of the oldest such specimen, according to a paper in the journal Current Biology. The fossil is a member of Haidomyrmecinae — an extinct subfamily from the Cretaceous period. Those insects were armed with scythe-like jaws that researchers suspect the ant deployed to pin down or impale its prey.“What makes this discovery particularly i ...read more

In 2018, a study made headlines when it found that a captive orca, or killer whale, was able to imitate human speech. The whale, called Wikie, lived at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France. Wikie was trained to produce the words "Ah ah," "hello," "Amy," and "one two three." (Wikie could also make a sound like a creaky door and imitate the call of an elephant.)It really shouldn’t be surprising that whales have a knack for imitating speech. They’re very auditory animals, explains Deborah ...read more

Melting glaciers in North America 10,000 years ago may have given continental drift a bit of a push. Similar activity in Greenland now could eventually trigger volcanic eruptions in Iceland.Geoscientists modeled a chain of events that demonstrate how sea level rise impacts plate tectonics, they report in the journal Nature.“As ice volume was greatly reduced, it caused a huge motion in Earth’s crust,” Tao Yuan, a graduate student at Colorado University, Boulder, and an author of the paper, ...read more