(Credit: Shutterstock) Here’s a sentence.  Here’s another one.  Notice anything? If you’re like me, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. Using two spaces after a sentence seems to serve no other purpose today than to signify that the typist probably learned their keyboard skills in another era. And it’s pretty annoying, to boot. Nevertheless, there’s a minority of purist (or simply contrarian) keyboard warriors who hold that the two-space r ...read more

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, as photographed by Galileo. (Credit: NASA/JPL) Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, is colossal. It’s bigger than Mercury or Pluto and boasts bright auroras, along with a unique magnetic field. Much of what we know about the moon comes from the Galileo spacecraft’s flybys of Ganymede in the 1990s. But a lot of information from the NASA mission has yet to be published. A magnetosphere, or the area where a planetary body’s magnetic field is dominant, i ...read more

A representation of a blastoid, which is a synthetic embryo formed in the lab, from stem cells. The green cells are the trophoblast stem cells (the future placenta), whereas the red cells are the embryonic stem cells (the future embryo). (Credit: Nicolas Rivron) Studying human development — especially the earliest stages of pregnancy — can be a tricky thing. Usually, scientists need embryos to examine these early stages. The problem is, embryos are an expensive, limited resour ...read more

Researchers say cut and percussion marks on a rhino suggest a hominin presence in the Philippines more than 700,000 years ago, ten times earlier than previously known. (Credit Ignicco et al 2018, 10.1038/s41586-018-0072-8) More than 700,000 years ago, in what’s now the north end of the Philippines, a hominin (or a whole bunch of them) butchered a rhino, systematically cracking open its bones to access the nutritious marrow within, according to a new study. There’s just one ...read more

He believes this is more than a trivial distinction. Our clothing has as much as 20 square feet of external surface area, touching nearly every part of the body. That means a piezoelectric textile could potentially hear our surroundings, sense our movements and monitor internal organs, such as our heart and lungs, with unprecedented fidelity. It could also generate energy as we walk. And piezoelectricity is only one of many electronic capacities Fink’s lab is systematically mastering. Mich ...read more

The longest sea route possible. Confused as to why it’s curved? Check this out. (Credit: B. Chabukswar et al) When your reddit debate spurs a scientific paper, you know it’s a good one. Back in 2012, reddit user kepleronlyknows posted a map to the r/MapPorn subreddit purporting to show the longest straight line you could sail around the planet without encountering land. It ran from Pakistan to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, barely scraping by the east coast of Africa and tunne ...read more

A tequila farmer walks down rows of blue agave planted for harvest. (Credit: T photography/Shutterstock) In the late 1950s, “Tequila,” The Champs’ most famous song, popularized the spirit beyond Mexico. Just a few years later, margaritas, a classic tequila-based cocktail, were all the rage in American bars. The Rolling Stones even showed their love for the liquor, calling their ‘72 tour “The Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise Tour.” In the ‘90s, with the spir ...read more

The summit lava lake at Kilauea, seen on April 30, 2018. The lake level had dropped 15 meters over the weekend. USGS/HVO. We’ve been keeping a close watch on Kilauea over the past couple weeks and now, after weeks of high lava lake levels and inflation, events might be starting to unfold. Yesterday, the crater floor at Pu’u O’o on the East Rift partially collapsed, suggesting that the lava that was filling in below the crater floor was draining away. This came during a bout of ...read more

Songs of the Humpback Whale was a 1970 album consisting of about 35 minutes of mellow blooping. It was extremely popular. But as a vocal star, the humpback may have unfairly overshadowed another whale—the bowhead. Recordings high in the Arctic have revealed that these animals have a far more extensive repertoire than the humpbacks do. Researchers lowered microphones into the Fram Strait, a chilly strip of sea east of Greenland, for three years between 2010 and 20 ...read more

Dogs’ lack of fear might explain why they’re so at risk of life-threatening snakebites. Photo Credit: Nantawit Chuchue/Shutterstock If you feel your stomach flutter uncomfortably at the mere image of a slithering serpent, you’re not alone. It’s thought that snakes make about half of us anxious, and 2-3% of people are Ophidiophobic—that is, they’re deeply afraid of snakes. Such fear is thought to have deep roots; over the course of our evo ...read more