Hurricane Helene caused deadly and destructive flooding when it swept through the Southeast on Sept. 26-29, 2024. Across a broad swath of western North Carolina, where the worst flooding occurred, the amount of rainfall exceeded levels that would be expected on average only once every 1,000 years.But this wasn’t the first 1,000-year rainstorm in North Carolina this year. In mid-September, an unnamed slow-moving storm produced more than a foot of rainfall closer to the Atlantic coast. This stor ...read more

On the arid and seemingly sterile surface of the Atacama Desert lies an invaluable treasure of history and culture: thousands of ancient geoglyphs etched on the slopes of the hills, silent witnesses to the caravan routes of pre-Hispanic peoples.Gonzalo Pimentel, archaeologist and president of the Atacama Foundation, describes them as accurate maps leading to the Pacific Ocean and records of memories, habits, and customs. Colossal human figures, llamas, birds, and enigmatic geometric shapes have ...read more

Of the thousands of insect species crawling and flying around the world, ladybugs probably rank among some of the cutest. These tiny, rotund creatures scuttle about on plant leaves, easily distinguishable thanks to their sports car red and small black spots. Sometimes, they might even land on you – if you’re lucky. There are some 5,000 species of ladybugs on Earth, though the most common type in North America is the convergent ladybug. Contrary to the name, they’re not actually “bugs” ...read more

Summer may be over in the Western Hemisphere by now, but that doesn’t mean that sunburn stops for the season. Many of us might be familiar with the heated skin and gnarly new tanlines that follow us home after a day spent under the sun – but what happens when sunburn becomes serious?While “sun poisoning” is not an official medical diagnosis, it’s a term many doctors use to refer to this kind of intense sunburn. If you haven’t heard of it before, it might be even more difficult to gau ...read more

The past few years have seen a hot new trend in Halloween decorations — giant skeletons. Some soar several feet tall. Others climb from a coffin, creep in a graveyard, or sit on a porch swing.But Americans’ fascination with giant skeletons isn’t new.“In the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s, there were a lot of newspaper reports on giant bones being discovered, especially out West,” says Scott Tribble, author of A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America.Tribble says ...read more

NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade – but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip.This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled rockets the agency develops now is called nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses nuclear fission and could one day power a rocket that makes the trip in just half ...read more

Music surrounds us. It can be a companion throughout the day – listening on the way to school or work, checking out a favorite artist with friends, hearing it live at concerts and sporting events, enjoying or enduring it in stores and restaurants, and then listening again in the evening to unwind.As meaningful and uplifting as music can be, it might also help you while studying, working on school projects, and doing homework. As a clinical assistant professor of audiology, I can tell you the r ...read more

In the science fiction film The Fly, a scientist accidentally transforms into a winged insect that ultimately destroys him. In a collection of science articles about the fly, a team of scientists this week unpacked the details of how the Drosophila melanogaster brain operates — paving the way for a better understanding of how the human mind turns senses into actions, processes thoughts, and, perhaps most mysterious of all, stores experiences as memories.The foundation of the publications in Na ...read more

Nostalgia, mixed with a bit of curiosity, can lead to some important insights.When Richard Karban, an ecology researcher at the University of California, Davis, decided to return to the forest he surveyed in 1977 — this time accompanied by his daughter Claire, a graduate student in ecology at the University of Colorado, Boulder — he expected to see little change. After all, when he first visited Whiteoak Canyon in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, he’d seen much the same tree composit ...read more

Most CubeSats weigh less than a bowling ball, and some are small enough to hold in your hand. But the impact these instruments are having on space exploration is gigantic. CubeSats – miniature, agile, and cheap satellites – are revolutionizing how scientists study the cosmos.A standard-size CubeSat is tiny, about 4 pounds (roughly 2 kilograms). Some are larger, maybe four times the standard size, but others weigh no more than a pound.As a professor of electrical and computer engineering who ...read more