Hurricane Dorian seen from the MODIS imager on Terra, August 31, 2019. NASA.
We seem to now live in an age where people are comfortable ignoring experts, especially those in the sciences.
You may have noticed that Hurricane Dorian didn't hit Alabama. Depending on the circles in which you run, you might think it was a "close call" or a completely mistaken statement that Alabama was ever in any real danger from the hurricane. However, what is clear is that when experts in meteorology -- the ...read more
(Credit: Shidlovski/Shutterstock)
Cancer therapies often fail to work when tested in clinical trials. As a result, a startling 97 percent of drugs designed for specific cancer treatments do not receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Now researchers say they may have figured out part of the reason why.
In a new study out Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists report many cancer drugs don't work the way their designers assumed the ...read more
Dead seaweed chokes beaches across the Caribbean every year. (Credit: Playa del Carmen/Shutterstock)
(Inside Science) -- In the summer of 2018, thousands of tons of a prolific seaweed called sargassum invaded the pristine beaches of the Caribbean. In Mexico, the turquoise waters and clear, smooth sand of the touristy Mayan Riviera turned into a brown mess. The sight of sargassum -- a type of brown algae -- and its smell scared tourists away, and local ecosystems started to suffer greatly. ...read more
The MeerKAT telescope is superimposed on a radio image of the Milky Way's center. Radio bubbles extend from between the two nearest antennas to the upper right corner, with filaments running parallel to the bubbles. (Credit: SARAO/MeerKAT)
The Milky Way is blowing bubbles. Two giant radio bubbles,
extending out from the galaxy for over 1,400 light years, were just discovered
in X-ray data. Astronomers think the bubbles started forming a few million
years ago due to some type of cataclysmic ...read more
The watery exoplanet K2-18 b is surrounded by water vapor in this artist's illustration. (Credit: Alex Boersma)
Astronomers have finally uncovered water vapor in the atmosphere
of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. The
find means that liquid water could also exist on the rocky world's surface,
potentially even forming a global
ocean.
The discovery, made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, serves as the
first detection of water vapor in the atmosphere ...read more
It can be tricky to make it look like people are doing things they never did. (Credit: Alexander Sobol/Shutterstock)
Lots of people – including Congress – are worried about fake videos and imagery distorting the truth, purporting to show people saying and doing things they never said or did.
I’m part of a larger U.S. government project that is working on developing ways to detect images and videos that have been manipulated. My team’s work, though, is to play the ro ...read more
A new pterosaur dubbed the "Cold Dragon of the North" is one of the largest ever. (Credit: David Maas)
(Inside Science) -- A new species of giant pterosaur has been discovered in the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, whose snowy, windy winters gave Cryodrakon its name. Based on the largest vertebra yet found of this species, adults may have possessed wingspans of roughly 10 meters (33 feet).
"That's an animal probably comparable to a giraffe in height -- more than 4 meters [13 f ...read more
Orange roughy live in the deep ocean, where they're often caught by trawling ships. (Credit: New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research)
Would you eat an animal if you knew it was as
old as the U.S. Constitution?
Scientists in New Zealand have aged a fish
called an orange roughy at between 230- and 245-years-old, making it
one of the longest-lived fin-fish on record.
The ancient fish was born in the late 1700s
— and then caught
in 2015 by a New Zealand com ...read more
This artist’s concept of a lake at the North Pole of Titan shows the raised features that inspired the theory that exploding pockets of liquid nitrogen may be forming craters, which become lake basins.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Saturn’s moon Titan is a distant and frigid world, but it also carries intriguing similarities to Earth’s own terrain. Liquid lakes and seas dot its landscape, though the methane and ethane that fill them are a far cry from terrestrial water. Now a n ...read more
A skull from Sima de los Huesos showing evidence of blunt force trauma. (Credit: Sala et al./PLOS One)
From the scene, authorities recovered DNA, a stone handaxe and more than 7,000 scattered bones, including a bashed human skull. It was a case for the ages. But there was one complication: the events unfolded 430,000 years ago.
The evidence was unearthed by anthropologists beginning in the 1980s at Sima de los Huesos — the “pit of bones” — in Spain’s Atapuer ...read more
