Most people don’t enjoy going to the dentist. There’s just something off-putting about having your mouth wide open while someone’s scratching and scraping your precious chompers. But at least dentists can give you Novocain to make your mouth go numb for the more intense procedures. You were born in the best of times, because for the majority of the human timeline, our ancestors didn’t have it so easy. Cavities really started wreaking havoc when humans started farming abou ...read more

Oftentimes, throwing a punch at something (or someone) ends up hurting the hand behind it more than anything else. Bruised skin, sore knuckles and even cracked wrists can result from an ill-fated punch, and that's just with human-level strength. Just imagine what it's like to be a mantis shrimp. One-punch Crustacean Mantis shrimp might just be the best boxers in the world. They smash apart shellfish with oversized, teardrop-shaped forelimbs that can snap out with more acceler ...read more

Supermassive black holes reside at the center of most, if not all, massive (and possibly low-mass) galaxies. They range in size from millions to billions of solar masses, and they can eat voraciously or not at all, depending on their surroundings. But one thing is clear: Black holes don’t have very good table manners, as a team led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder confirmed last week at the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. The ...read more

Your nose, mouth, skin pores and…other…body holes each serve their unique functions. But most of them also double as biological exhaust pipes, spewing gaseous byproducts of the myriad internal chemical reactions keeping you alive. And, just as we measure emissions form our internal-combustion vehicles, advances in medical technology make it easier to analyze the gases you leak into the atmosphere. Scientists at RMIT University in Australia developed a pill-sized sensor that measu ...read more

I just learned about a truly remarkable case in which a doctor apparently wrote a paper about a serial killer who murdered her five children - without realizing what had happened. It's an old case, but it doesn't seem to be widely known today. The paper is called Prolonged apnea and the sudden infant death syndrome: clinical and laboratory observations and it was written in 1972 by Dr Alfred Steinschneider of Syracuse, New York. In this paper, Steinschneider described the case of a woman, "Mr ...read more

Although it’s possible for space missions to communicate data with Earth, the process is anything but fast. Voyager 1, for example, takes about 19 hours to send a signal back to Earth, and that lag only increases as the spacecraft gets further away.  For truly long-term, deep space missions, the significant amount of time it takes to send a signal isn’t going to cut it. The spacecraft will need to adjust its own trajectory without relying on ground navigation. That’s where ...read more

One of the many consequences of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is ocean acidification—the lowering of seawater pH as CO2 chemically reacts with dissolved ions in seawater. Scientists have found that more acidic waters are dangerous to many species, especially structure-builders like corals, and thus the potential drop in pH predicted in the future would be devastating to marine habitats. So it's not surprising that many scientists are actively looking for ways to mitigate thi ...read more

I'm a bit late to this story, but it's significant enough that I didn't want to let it pass by without posting something about it. The long and short of it is this: 2017 truly was a horrific year for weather and climate disasters, both in the United States and the world as a whole. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, fires and freezes in the United States claimed at least 362 lives and injured many more in 2017. In total, the nation experienced 16 weather and climate disaster ...read more

Attempting to contain a sneeze could be a recipe for disaster. A 34-year-old patient visited a hospital in the United Kingdom complaining of an extremely sore throat and a dramatic voice change after attempting to suppress a sneeze by pinching his nose and closing his mouth. He told doctors he felt a popping sensation in his neck and noticed immediate swelling after trying to contain the sneeze. When doctors examined him, they could hear crackling sounds—known as crepitus in medical pa ...read more

British surfers are coming back from the beach with more than good vibes. A study from University of Exeter researchers found the surfers had levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that were three times higher than those who didn't hang ten. It's likely the result of ingesting seawater laden with bacteria from sewage and run-off, they say, and it's another sign of the impending health crisis such bacteria could represent. Surf's Up! The researchers looked at just under 300 people from ...read more