NASA is about to make it a little easier to check your Instagram in zero gravity. Two teams, Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations, are working together to finally make interplanetary internet a thing. Previous efforts to bring WiFi throughout the solar system haven’t always been successful, but this time, it could become reality.
It will work using something called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, which is pretty similar to the internet you& ...read more
Today, the moon is about as inhospitable to life as it gets. The little water that’s there is trapped in ice or rock. It’s otherwise dry and airless, fluctuating in temperature by hundreds of degrees anywhere the sun shines. But long ago? That’s an entirely different story.
New research published in Astrobiology suggests that the moon may have been shockingly habitable in the past during at least two periods — shortly a ...read more
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the largest member of the Milky Way’s gang of galactic neighbors, known as the Local Group. With around a trillion suns worth of mass, Andromeda’s gravitational influence is a force to be reckoned with. And according to new research, no galaxy in the Local Group knows this better than M32, an oddball satellite galaxy now orbiting Andromeda.
In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers showed that about 2 billion ...read more
Sea turtles may be eating themselves to death. In this case, though, the phrase likely doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Green sea turtles in the Caribbean may be in danger of starving to death in the near future thanks to a recent invasion of seagrass. The marine plant is spreading quickly and edging out native species helped, ironically, by the sea turtles themselves.
Underwater Gardens
Green sea turtles forage in beds of seagrass, an abundant resource in their underwate ...read more
By the end of the century, rising CO2 levels will cut fishes’ sense of smell by nearly half, new research finds. And the impaired olfaction will threaten marine ecosystems and our food supply. That’s according to a report Monday in Nature Climate Change.
Fish need a sharp smelling sense because many species spawn offshore, forcing newly hatched fish to find their way home by following their noses. Smell also helps fish locate food, communicate with their pa ...read more
As the climate warms, seas will rise, storms will proliferate and cities will bake. But, in addition to the marquee issues global warming causes, there will likely be a host of tangential issues, many of which we may not anticipate.
A new study in Nature Climate Change looks at the psychological effects a warming climate will have on humans, focusing specifically on mental health. Though the work is somewhat preliminary, the authors pick out a broad trend of ...read more
Sock Signals
Throughout Africa and Asia, elephants can be seen as problem causers. The behemoth mammals destroy crops and threaten farmers’ livelihoods when they trundle through fields after tasty snacks. Scarecrows, fences and noisemaking tripwires don’t deter the beasts, and tensions with humans can escalate so much that elephants are sometimes shot.
Now, scientists have discovered that the odor of angry honeybees is an effective elephant repellant. Th ...read more
Two years ago, a paper by Swedish neuroscientist Anders Eklund and colleagues caused a media storm. The paper, Cluster Failure, reported that the most widely used methods for the analysis of fMRI data are flawed and produce a high rate of false positives.
As I said at the time, Cluster Failure wasn't actually making especially new claims because Eklund et al. had been publishing quite similar results years earlier - but it wasn't until Cluster Failure that they attracted widespread attent ...read more
Weather forecasts and remote sensing imagery show that the Branson duck boat tragedy was avoidable
The duck boat tragedy in Branson, Missouri, was made all the more horrible by the fact that it was completely avoidable.
While Jim Pattison Jr., president of the company that owns Ride the Ducks Branson, claimed the storm “came out of nowhere,� nothing could be further from the truth.
...read more
Hidden away in the woods near the upstate New York town of Lake George is a cave. The entrance of the cavern, an abandoned graphite mine, is almost perfectly round, with a trickle of water running out of it. On a weekday morning in late February, researchers, led by Carl Herzog, a wildlife biologist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, gather at the cave mouth and swap hiking boots for waders before filing in.
Kate Ritzko, a fish and wildlife technician for th ...read more
