Back in 1938, physicist Hans Bethe figured out that the Sun and other stars generate energy by fusing hydrogen into helium. With that mystery solved, solar scientists thought they had a pretty good understanding of what was going on at the heart of the sun. But an experiment that started in 1967 made astronomers just a tad uneasy. While it takes sunlight just eight minutes to travel to Earth, the energy generated in our star’s core needs tens or hundreds of thousands of ye ...read more

Only 4 countries left in the 2018 Geology World Cup! Vote in the semifinal matches! Game 1: Perú vs. Colombia In what is likely a massive upset, Perú snuck by Russia by only a few percentage points. So, now the match for the finals is two South American teams. There isn't a lot that sets Colombia and Perú apart: they both have active volcanoes, they both experience earthquakes, they both host parts of the Andes and parts of the Amazon Basin. Most people li ...read more

Astronomers generally agree that planets form out of the dusty debris disks that surround most newborn stars. When one of these so-called protoplanetary disks rotates around a nascent star, globs of material clump together. Over the course of a few million years, these clumps (called planetesimals) grow larger and larger, forming a protoplanet that eventually clears out its orbital path within the disk. And when a protoplanet gets massive enough, gravity forces it into a spherical shape, fin ...read more

Did your dad like to take cold showers? Or perhaps he was a ski buff, or an open-water swimmer. It's too late now, but you very might well wish that your paternal progenitor had a fondness for cold temperatures. A new study published Monday in Nature Medicine shows that mice exposed to cold temperatures sire offspring that are both slimmer and healthier on high-fat diets than those whose fathers were kept warm. Freezing Fathers Fight Fat Chilling mice to see ...read more

The past few weeks have featured a few stories about how Albert Einstein’s theories, or the ideas underpinning them, have all been confirmed to a new degree of accuracy. That’s usually the case: Scientists try to disprove Einstein, and Einstein always wins. But that’s not to say the man was infallible. He was human, just like the rest of us, and did make some mistakes. Here’s a few of them. 1) The cosmological consta ...read more

Bright pink 1.1-billion-year-old molecules from deep beneath the Sahara desert are now the oldest biological colors that scientists have discovered so far, and could shed light on why complex, multicellular life took so long to evolve on Earth. This discovery "really came as a fluke," said study senior author Jochen Brocks, a paleobiogeochemist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "About 10 years ago, a petroleum company looking for oil in the Sahara was exploring the black ...read more

Hot flashes — sudden rushes of overwhelming warmth that heat up the body like a roaring furnace – plague millions of women, and some men. Now scientists find a single type of brain cell is responsible for setting off these heat bombs in mice. The discovery may lead to better treatments for keeping the body’s thermostat at a pleasant temperature. Currently, the go-to remedy for hot flashes is estrogen replacement therapy to compensate for ...read more

In the second century, the Greco-Roman writer Oppian described men in rowboats thrusting harpoons into a “sea monster,� which is then roped and towed to shore. At the time, the Romans had a successful fishing industry in the Strait of Gibraltar, the western waterway to the Mediterranean world. Historians sometimes say Roman fishing at this bottleneck included whaling, but other than Oppian’s poem and other indirect clues, there was no e ...read more

Amid a growing number of finds that challenge the long-held timeline of the peopling of the Americas, researchers get to the point: Artifacts found at a site in Texas, including projectile points of a previously unknown style, are at least 16,000 years old, pre-dating the conventional arrival date of First Americans. For decades, the Clovis culture loomed large in theories about when the First Americans arrived to the New World. Named for a town in New Mexico where the f ...read more

Nearly a hundred stone tools excavated from multiple layers at a site in China point to hominins — our ancestors and closest kin — being in East Asia about 2.1 million years ago. The find is the oldest evidence of hominins outside of Africa by more than 200,000 years and begs the question: what species made them? Hominins are those species in the greater primate family tree that are more closely related to us than to other apes. That includes members of ou ...read more