Since high profile eruptions like the ones at Kīlauea or Fuego, those of us in the volcanosphere get a lot of emails/tweet/questions that ask a very similar question: Is volcanic activity increasing? In fact, many times the question isn't even if it is increasing but why it is increasing, accepting without question the notion that we are experiencing more volcanic eruptions today than in the Earth's past. However, ask a volcanologist (like me) that question, and you'll ge ...read more

It’s probably no surprise to anyone that watching pornography can give unrealistic expectations of what sex is really like. But how skewed is this representation? These heroic scientists took it upon themselves to find out. To do so, they watched the top 50 most-viewed videos on PornHub, and recorded “the frequency of male and female orgasm, orgasm-inducing sex acts (and whether activity inducing female orgasms included some form of clitoral stimulation), an ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. You know the feeling. It’s impossible to resist. You just need to yawn. A yawn consists of an extended gaping of the mouth followed by a more rapid closure. In mammals and birds, a long intake of breath and shorter exhale follows the gaping of the mouth, but in other species such as fish, amphibians and snakes there is no intake of breath. But what’s behind a yawn, why does it occur? In ...read more

Nina Lanza expected Antarctica to be cold. After all, she and her seven fellow meteorite hunters weren’t allowed to board their transport in New Zealand until they’d proved they’d packed all the necessary gear. And she’d been warned about the endless daylight at their location smack dab in between McMurdo Station and the South Pole. But, as she says, “People try to tell you what it’s ...read more

How many windows are there in New York City? However you answer this classic interview day curveball, imagine if we devised a way to use each of those windows to convert the sun’s rays into electricity. Whoa. William Rankine, a noted 19th century Scottish mechanical engineer, would call that an idea with a lot of potential. Power From Glass While we (most likely) will never turn every window in NYC into a solar cell, it won’t be because we never tried. Ca ...read more

Their skeletal remains curled into sleep-like positions familiar to any dog owner, the 10,000-year-old canines found at a site in Illinois are the earliest known dogs of the Americas. Ever since they were unearthed nearly a half-century ago, the animals have been at the heart of a debate: Were the dogs of the New World descended from Eurasian wolves and then brought here by humans, or were they locally domesticated from American wolves? New genetic research answers that question â€&r ...read more

Scientists staged dogfights between moths and bats — and experimentally altered the moths' wings — to recreate evolution and shed light on the sonic illusions moths spin to evade bats. For more than 60 million years, bats and moths have engaged in an evolutionary arms race across the night sky. Bats hunt their insect prey using ultrasonic sonar, while the insects counter these predators with numerous elaborate strategies, including aerial acrobatics, sonar ...read more

Spidey-senses tingling? It’s time to fly. Though those of us without arachnid superpowers might not notice, we are constantly surrounded by electric fields. The ground carries a slight negative charge and the atmosphere is slightly positive, and, as a consequence, negatively charged particles can be borne up into the air. Some kinds of spiders may be taking advantage of the effect to hitch rides on the fields using negatively charged spide ...read more

For decades, astronomers have thought that planets form out of the rotating disks of debris that encircle most newly formed stars. Within these so-called protoplanetary disks — which can be up to 1,000 astronomical units wide (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance of 93 million miles) — particles of gas and dust clump together over time, slowly but surely forming larger bodies that may eventually reach planetary status. However, despite years of searching, ...read more

At some point in the last 4 million or so years, our hominin ancestors climbed down from the trees and got grounded. The transition between arboreal and terrestrial was, like just about everything in evolution, gradual. For decades researchers have debated, often heatedly, which hominin species was the first to be fully bipedal, walking and running rather than climbing. Today, great answers come in small packages: A rare, mostly-complete juvenile hominin foot reveals new and unprecedented ...read more