Today, insect eating is on the rise. Did our ancestors chow down on the critters, too? (Credit: CK Bangkok Photography/Shutterstock) Anticipating food shortages in coming decades, some companies are touting insects as tomorrow’s protein source. Entrepreneurs are jumping on board and chips made of crickets are hitting grocery shelves. But scientists advise caution: They say more research is needed on the environmental impact of rearing insects at an industrial scale. As sustainabilit ...read more

A very weak paper in PNAS has attracted some attention lately: An experimental test of the ovulatory homolog model of female orgasm The paper aims to be a test of the hypothesis that the human female orgasm is a kind of evolutionary relic from an earlier stage in evolution. In humans, ovulation happens on a monthly cycle and is not related to sexual activity. However, in some mammal species, such as rabbits, ovulation is triggered by sex (or copulation, as biologists say). In the new ...read more

NASA's InSight lander has its seismic instrument tucked under a shield to protect it from wind and extreme temperatures. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s Mars InSight spacecraft landed on the Red Planet in November 2018. Scientists equipped the mission with a seismometer so they could learn how Mars releases seismic energy — that is, to get a feel for how the Red Planet rumbles. So far, InSight has recorded more than 100 seismic signals, and researchers are confident at leas ...read more

(Credit: MIT/Image courtesy of the researchers) When even the most powerful telescopes can’t capture the views you want, it helps to have natural magnifying glasses to rely on. In a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how they zoomed in to capture a young, star-forming galaxy roughly nine billion light-years away in X-ray light. To study such a distant galaxy, they used the fact that massive objects can warp space-time around them and magnify light ...read more

These snapshots of two merging stars in action show the overall strength of the magnetic field in color (yellow is more magnetic), as well as the magnetic field lines (hatching). The stars on the left, which don't have very strong magnetic fields, are just about to merge into a more massive and magnetic star (right). According to new research, such mergers can dramatically bolster the strength of the final star's magnetic field. (Credit: F. Schneider et al./Nature volume 574, pages 211–214 ...read more

The Gemini Observatory in Hawaii caught this first-ever color image of the interstellar comet Borisov and its faint tail. (Credit:Composite image by Travis Rector. Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA) Asteroids, comets and other rocky objects litter the solar system, left over from when the planets formed. Scientists study these space rocks to learn about what the early solar system was like. Now, we’re entering an era in which we can learn about alien planetary systems in the same way, ...read more

(Credit: Rachata Teyparsit/Shutterstock) A brief bout of insomnia can be maddening. You know what it feels like. We all do. Lying awake chasing feverish thoughts from our minds while the slow tick of passing minutes compounds sleep-stealing anxiety. For most of us these episodes are a brief interruption to our sleep schedules. Others experience more persistent insomnia, but at a level that's often manageable. But for a very rare group of people with a frightening disease called fatal fami ...read more

Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov trains for the Apollo-Soyuz mission in April 1975 . (Credit: NASA) Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space, has died at the age of 85 at the Burdenko Military Hospital in Moscow. His death was announced Friday, Oct. 11, by Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. Born in 1934, Leonov became the eleventh Soviet cosmonaut and achieved major milestones of space exploration. During the Voskhod 2 mission, on March 18, 1965, he exited his capsule ...read more

The new study still finds that reducing unprocessed red meat consumption by three servings in a week is associated with an an approximately eight per cent lower lifetime risk of heart disease, cancer and early death. (Credit: Shutterstock) Another diet study, another controversy and the public is left wondering what to make of it. This time it’s a series of studies in the Annals of Internal Medicine by an international group of researchers concluding people need not reduce t ...read more

A more realistic simulation of the black hole featured in the movie Interstellar. (Credit: James et al./IOP Science) In the 2014 movie Interstellar, astronauts investigate planets orbiting a supermassive black hole as potential homes for human life. A supermassive black hole warps surrounding space-time, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and at least one of the planets in the movie, called Miller’s planet, experienced time passing at a slowed-down rate. For eac ...read more