Does idle chat and unhappiness go together? Eight years ago, a study was published (Mehl et al. 2010) suggesting that they do. The authors reported that "Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations", triggering many alarming headlines. Now, however, the same researchers have carried out a much larger study and have failed to confirm the chat-unhappiness association. The new paper is published in Psychological Science, the same journal where the ori ...read more

By Sharman Apt Russell  The lazy days of summer are perfect for kicking back and watching the clouds float by. Why not contribute to citizen science from the comfort of your hammock with this cloud-observing project from NASA? Help NASA understand clouds by reporting your observations with the citizen science project S’Cool  Clouds are so democratic. You don’t need to be rich or famous or smart or athletic to enjoy th ...read more

Experiments on a neural circuit hidden within a mysterious part of the brain may have revealed new ways to control hunger, a new study finds. Given the vital role that food plays in survival, it's not surprising that scientists have previously discovered many brain regions linked with eating. For example, hunger can trigger the release of the hormone ghrelin, which can in turn trigger neurons that stimulate feeding. However, so far efforts to control feeding and unhealthy eating behavi ...read more

Since high profile eruptions like the ones at Kīlauea or Fuego, those of us in the volcanosphere get a lot of emails/tweet/questions that ask a very similar question: Is volcanic activity increasing? In fact, many times the question isn't even if it is increasing but why it is increasing, accepting without question the notion that we are experiencing more volcanic eruptions today than in the Earth's past. However, ask a volcanologist (like me) that question, and you'll ge ...read more

It’s probably no surprise to anyone that watching pornography can give unrealistic expectations of what sex is really like. But how skewed is this representation? These heroic scientists took it upon themselves to find out. To do so, they watched the top 50 most-viewed videos on PornHub, and recorded “the frequency of male and female orgasm, orgasm-inducing sex acts (and whether activity inducing female orgasms included some form of clitoral stimulation), an ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. You know the feeling. It’s impossible to resist. You just need to yawn. A yawn consists of an extended gaping of the mouth followed by a more rapid closure. In mammals and birds, a long intake of breath and shorter exhale follows the gaping of the mouth, but in other species such as fish, amphibians and snakes there is no intake of breath. But what’s behind a yawn, why does it occur? In ...read more

Nina Lanza expected Antarctica to be cold. After all, she and her seven fellow meteorite hunters weren’t allowed to board their transport in New Zealand until they’d proved they’d packed all the necessary gear. And she’d been warned about the endless daylight at their location smack dab in between McMurdo Station and the South Pole. But, as she says, “People try to tell you what it’s ...read more

How many windows are there in New York City? However you answer this classic interview day curveball, imagine if we devised a way to use each of those windows to convert the sun’s rays into electricity. Whoa. William Rankine, a noted 19th century Scottish mechanical engineer, would call that an idea with a lot of potential. Power From Glass While we (most likely) will never turn every window in NYC into a solar cell, it won’t be because we never tried. Ca ...read more

Their skeletal remains curled into sleep-like positions familiar to any dog owner, the 10,000-year-old canines found at a site in Illinois are the earliest known dogs of the Americas. Ever since they were unearthed nearly a half-century ago, the animals have been at the heart of a debate: Were the dogs of the New World descended from Eurasian wolves and then brought here by humans, or were they locally domesticated from American wolves? New genetic research answers that question â€&r ...read more

Scientists staged dogfights between moths and bats — and experimentally altered the moths' wings — to recreate evolution and shed light on the sonic illusions moths spin to evade bats. For more than 60 million years, bats and moths have engaged in an evolutionary arms race across the night sky. Bats hunt their insect prey using ultrasonic sonar, while the insects counter these predators with numerous elaborate strategies, including aerial acrobatics, sonar ...read more