Amber, being fossilized tree resin, usually preserves scenes from an ancient forest. The latest stunning find from Myanmar, however, is a souvenir from a day at the beach 99 million years ago, including the first ammonite, a marine animal, preserved in amber. The piece of amber is small — about the size of a standard pair of dice, and less than a quarter of an ounce — but it's jam-packed with animals that tell an intriguing story about its journey from tree trunk to fossil bed. ...read more

Apollo 10 doesn’t get much attention. On the rare occasion people talk about the mission right before the first lunar landing, it’s lumped into the “pre-Apollo 11” category and dismissed as one of the stepping stones on the bridge to the Moon. But it was far more interesting than just a mission that preceded Apollo 11.  My latest appearance on CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks was all about Apollo 10, but first, a little background on the mission. In October of ...read more

A paper in PNAS got some attention on Twitter recently. It's called Childhood trauma history is linked to abnormal brain connectivity in major depression and in it, the authors Yu et al. report finding (as per the Significance Statement) A dramatic primary association of brain resting-state network (RSN) connectivity abnormalities with a history of childhood trauma in major depressive disorder (MDD). The authors go on to note that even though "the brain imaging took place decades after trauma ...read more

In the dim light of dusk, the world appears gray. That's because we, like most vertebrates, have just on type of rod opsin, the light-sensitive pigment in our eyes that lets us see in low light. During the day, a different set of pigments in cone cells pick up a broader range of wavelengths, giving us color vision. Now, an international team of researchers has discovered that fish living in the dark depths of the oceans nearly a mile below the surface may use rod opsins — which grant ...read more

Long before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, people were using antibiotics to combat infections. In the late 1800s, French physician Ernest Duchesne observed Arab stable boys treating sores with mold growing on saddles. Duchesne took a sample of the fungus, identified it as Penicillium and used it to cure guinea pigs infected with typhoid. Earlier still, texts from ancient civilizations, including Rome, Egypt and China, discussed the healing powers of moldy bread applied t ...read more

Our universe’s first galaxies shone hotter and brighter than scientists thought, according to a group of astronomers who tapped a whopping 400 hours of observing time on NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The discovery could answer a long-standing question about how light first traveled freely through the infant universe. “We did not expect that Spitzer, with a mirror no larger than a Hula-Hoop, would be capable of seeing galaxies so close to the dawn of time,&rdqu ...read more

The universe's first stars were extremely hot and incredibly large, often reaching hundreds of times the mass of the Sun. And because they formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, these boiling behemoths contained virtually no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which were the only materials readily available at the time. But due to their sizeable stature, the first stars also lived fast and died hard — lasting only a couple million years before they exploded ...read more

And the stew is now boiling more vigorously: Heavy precipitation events have grown stronger and more frequent over the long run With big, boiling thunderstorms spewing hail and spawning tornadoes in the Southern Plains and beyond even as snow once again falls elsewhere, the weather sure does seem wild and weird this week. Spring often brings a meteorological roller coaster ride, thanks to the tension between lingering cold and spreading warmth. And, in fact, ...read more

Penguins love company — some colonies of the flightless bird boast numbers over 1 million. And with squads that can run that deep, you can be sure they make a mess of things, if you know what I mean. (Hint: I’m talking about poop.) But penguin waste isn’t just messy, it can be useful, too. Researchers have used it to help spot colonies in the past. Now, it seems that poop might be good for something else as well. In a study out in Current Biology, researchers from Vrije Univer ...read more

On Thursday, Blue Origin founder and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos unveiled the Blue Moon lander, a spacecraft that can deliver up to 6.5 tons of cargo – and possibly crew – to the lunar surface. The announcement was made at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Along with Blue Moon, he revealed his new BE-7 rocket for the lander, which he says has been in development for three years. If all goes according to plan, the company will test fire the rocket for the first time this summer. Toget ...read more