Just what is a second, exactly? The question has been open to interpretation ever since the first long-case grandfather clocks began marking off seconds in the mid-17th century and introduced the concept to the world at large. The answer, simply, is that a second is 1/60th of a minute, or 1/360th of an hour. But that's just pushing the question down the road a bit. After all, what's an hour? That answer is related to the best means of time-keeping ancient civilizations had — the ...read more

Earlier this week, an international team of geologists and climate scientists parked their ship off the coast of West Antarctica and started drilling. Their mission: To find out why glaciers here melted millions of years ago and what that can tell us about what’s happening today. Over the next couple months, their ship, the International Ocean Discovery Program’s JOIDES Resolution, will drill at least five core samples reaching thousands of feet below the Ross Sea. These cores will ...read more

What’s easier for you: identifying what color something is, or identifying a smell from a source you cannot see? If you’re like most people, color comes more easily. That, however, isn’t the case for all humans. According to a new study published Thursday in Current Biology, those who practice a hunter-gatherer lifestyle have an edge when it comes to naming a particular funk. Evolving at the Speed of Smell So why are people often better at describing what they see ve ...read more

Alcohol affects everyone a bit differently—some people take a few sips of beer and they’re stumbling all over, while others can ingest far more and still walk straight. You see, consuming alcohol affects the brain, which can impact your coordination and ability to think clearly—both of which are important to safely operating vehicles of all kinds, including drones. As of Monday, it is illegal in New Jersey for people to fly drones under the influence of drugs or alcohol, ...read more

The eye may not be the window to the soul in the conventional sense, but it is a window into the intricate workings of the mind. The pupil of the eye fluctuates and varies a lot in humans and many mammals. If tracked during the day, the pupil will not only respond to changes in external stimuli such as light, but also to internal conditions such as attention and emotional states. It is a signifier of what goes on in a person’s head and is linked to brain activity. Does this revelatory beh ...read more

If you feel like this year’s flu season is a rough one, that’s because it is. CBS News recently reported that this year’s flu virus is dominated by a particularly nasty strain, H3N2, which has reached almost every corner of the country, causing prolonged illness in many and in some instances, death. The very young and the elderly are particularly vulnerable, and this year’s vaccine may only be about 30% effective because H3N2 tends to mutate quickly. Citizen scientists ...read more

To find out just how your relaxed vacuuming schedule is affecting your baby's airway, researchers built a slightly frightening robotic infant. This legless, metallic baby crawled across five wool rugs from real people's homes in Finland. (The grounded aluminum tape covering the robot helped to minimize static during its 25 crawling sessions of 20 minutes each.) Researchers had asked the people sharing their rugs not to vacuum for two weeks beforehand. As the robot crawled, advanc ...read more

Romantic attraction is complex and hard for humans to quantify. That's why these scientists turned to machine learning to see if computers can do a better job. They asked participants to fill out a questionnaire with "more than 100 self-report measures about traits and preferences that past researchers have identified as being relevant to mate selection," and used those to train the computer models. They then had the participants speed-date each other for 4 minutes at a time and had the mode ...read more

Shine an ultraviolet light on a chameleon in the dark, and it will light up with an eerie blue glow. It's not their color-changing skin at play here, either. It's their bones. It's long been known that bones fluoresce under ultraviolet light, some researchers have even used the property to find fossils, but our bones are usually all covered up. To let the light out, chameleons have evolved rows of small bony outgrowths along their skeletons that sit just beneath the skin, making it thin e ...read more

Around 100 million adults in the United States are affected by chronic pain – pain that lasts for months or years on end. It is one of the country’s most underestimated health problems. The annual cost of managing pain is greater than that of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and the cost to the economy through decreased productivity reaches hundreds of billions of dollars. Chronic pain’s unremitting presence can lead to a variety of mental-health issues, depression above all ...read more