I, like a lot of other people on the internet, love rain. What can be nicer than a cool, refreshing burst of liquid precipitation, a sound so soothing people can actually pay to hear during dry spells? It’s good for dirty walkways, good for the plants, good for skydiving viruses…wait, what? Yes, it turns out that the rains are particularly rife with falling viruses. A new study out this week in The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal is a census of the viral invader ...read more

While we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, there's no doubt that human beings are actually quite awful at assessing risk. So I can understand why Ethan Linck thought to contextualize the risk of drinking from backcountry streams with data. "Life is triage, a constant series of negotiations between risks of varying severity," he wrote. "And how we talk about those risks matters." Yes, it does—which is exactly why his piece in Slate last week was so damag ...read more

On February 4, astronomers using the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) detected two asteroids with orbits that take them between Earth and the moon this week. Fortunately, neither object’s trajectory presents a threat to Earth. In fact, the week’s first visiting asteroid — dubbed asteroid 2018 CC — has already completed its closest approach to Earth. The small rocky body zoomed by our planet on Tuesday, February 6, at 3:10 p.m. EST, just 35 minutes before SpaceX ...read more

If you’re an orange juice lover, you should be thankful for the rather bizarre behavior of the Indian tectonic plate. A new and sweeping genetic study, published Wednesday in Nature, has pinpointed the origins and evolution of citrus. The study shows how the fruit emerged at a time of geological upheaval more than 8 million years ago in Southern Asia and spread thanks to genetic mutations that produced more palatable fruit for animals — as well as our human ancestors. Within this n ...read more

From the way you move and sleep, to how you interact with people around you, depression changes just about everything. It is even noticeable in the way you speak and express yourself in writing. Sometimes this “language of depression” can have a powerful effect on others. Just consider the impact of the poetry and song lyrics of Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain, who both killed themselves after suffering from depression. Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship betw ...read more

The question of how much wood a woodchuck can chuck may need to be reevaluated — new research published today in Nature reveals a process that can create wood with a strength-to-weight ratio stronger than most metals. Harder, Better, Stronger Many of the high-performance structural materials available today have at least one major drawback. Metals like steel may be strong, but they are also heavy and environmentally damaging. Composites and polymer-based materials work around these drawbac ...read more

Bombardier beetles are the Agent Ks of the insect world. You’ll recall, Men in Black’s Agent K (played by Tommy Lee Jones) exacts revenge after being swallowed by a giant cockroach alien at the New York State Pavilion. Agent K went down the alien’s gullet, but fired his weapon from inside the beast’s stomach (if it had one) blowing the bug into smithereens and spreading gooey guts everywhere. It was a fitting grand finale to the first installment of the franchise. Thoug ...read more

Take a moment and let this one sink in. It sure seems like the photographer turned a bit to the left before snapping the right-hand image. It's the lines in the cobblestones — they're all tilted in the second image compared to the first. A second glance reveals some irregularities, though. Though the lines look tilted relative to each other, the rest of the image looks unchanged. The trucks are in the same place, we see the same patch of sky, and if you look closely, we se ...read more

The Sun recently decided to go naked for awhile, as is evident from this image acquired by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It lost its spots. The image is from a video posted by NASA showing the Sun going naked from Jan. 26th to Jan. 30th, when a very small, lonely spot finally turns up. In fact, NASA says that with the exception of this one spot, the Sun was naked for almost two weeks. Spotless periods like this are common as the Sun approaches the low p ...read more

I’m a scientist and my job is to look below the surface of the earth. One of the questions often asked of people working with what we call geophysical imaging is, “How deep can you see?” It’s a difficult question to answer of course, since one person’s “deep” is another person’s “shallow”, and what is deep to the archaeologist will barely scratch the surface for the planetary seismologist. For my own part, I’m a “near-surfa ...read more