Climbers on the shear granite face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. You can see areas where fresh (white) rock is exposed that likely experienced a recent rockfall. Image: Erik Klemetti, September 2012. The last few weeks have seen multiple rockfalls at Yosemite National Park in California, one of which produced a fatality to a climber on the iconic vertical wall. Yesterday, another rockfall that was ten times bigger than the fatal one earlier in the month occurred that injured a park vi ...read more

(Credit: therealdrmiami/Snapchat) To thousands of dedicated followers on Snapchat and Instagram, he’s Dr. Miami, a plastic surgeon who has made a name posting sometimes graphic videos from inside the operating room. Paired with rap music, quirky antics and bad jokes, the Miami-based surgeon has become a brand unto himself, with a waiting list stretching into the years, an appearance on the Today show and legions of fans. But the American Society of Plastic Surgeons would like h ...read more

A report that nerve stimulation was able to partially restore consciousness in a patient in a vegetative state has attracted a great deal of attention this week. The paper, published in Current Biology from French researchers Martina Corazzol and colleagues, is certainly promising, but I didn’t find it entirely convincing. Corazzol et al.’s patient was a 35-year old man who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years following a car accident. After recieiving consent from his famil ...read more

In recent years, Aston Martin has become the vehicle of choice for fictional secret agent James Bond. And now the British carmaker is taking its 007 reputation into the deep end. On Thursday—in Monaco, of course—Aston Martin announced it is partnering with Triton Submarines LLC to build a limited edition, luxury submarine that will have even the wealthiest of the wealthy playing catch-up with the Jones’s. The endeavor is codenamed Project Neptune and it will build upon Tr ...read more

The Apollo lunar landing missions had limitations. The personal life support system backpacks moonwalking astronauts wore didn’t have replenishing stores of consumables. Once their power and oxygen supplies were low, there was no choice but to return to the lunar module, which itself could only support two men for three days. But in early 1969 NASA was already thinking ahead to longer duration missions, and to get the most out of these lunar stays, the agency commissioned two studies into ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Drones have the ability to do a lot of good, and recently they’ve been proving useful to rescuers in the United States by helping with hurricane recovery efforts. But what if they could do more than just document damage or survey areas? What if they could actually detect life? Researchers from the University of South Australia conducted a study published in Biomedical Engineering Online that shows drones can successfully measure heart and respiratory ...read more

These Asian amur sea stars (Asterias amurensis) were found ~5,000 miles from home on the Oregon coast.Image provided by Oregon State University March 11, 2011, 2:46 PM, 45 miles east of Tōhoku, Japan. Fifteen miles beneath the waves, a magnitude-9 megathrust earthquake strikes. The Pacific and Eurasian tectonic plates suddenly shift, shaking the surrounding crust for six minutes and creating a tidal wave almost 40 meters high, which races towards the coast of Japan. In the h ...read more

Research findings on three early Native American cultures from the southwestern United States show how each responded to environmental challenges in different ways that dramatically altered their people’s futures. (David Williams/SAPIENS) Along the cottonwood-lined rivers of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, the Mimbres people did something unique: By the year 1000, these farmers were producing stunning ceramics decorated with naturalistic images of fish, people, and rabb ...read more