Neutron stars are the hot, rapidly rotating remnants of massive stars. Many are pulsars, which send out radio signals that happen to coincide with Earth, like seeing the light from a lighthouse. (Credit: Kevin Gill) Neutron stars, the end-stage remnants of massive stars, are high-energy objects. They’re usually studied in X-rays, some of the most […]
Scientists looked at deaths in the United States going back decades and were astonished at the exponential rise in fatal drug overdoses. (Credit: Yaroslau Mikheyeu/shutterstock) Drug overdoses kill close to 200 people everyday in the United States. And while opioids are a major contributor to those deaths today, a new analysis of nearly 600,000 accidental […]
The super-Earth Kepler 62f, estimated to be around 40% larger than Earth. (Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech) If we wish to colonize another world, finding a planet with a gravitational field that humans can survive and thrive under will be crucial. If its gravity is too strong our blood will be pulled down into our legs, our bones […]
The male praying mantis (Hierodula tenuidentata) eating a guppy fish (Poecilia reticulata) starting from the tail, while the fish is still alive and breathing in the water. (Credit: Rajesh Puttaswamaiah) There’s nowhere you can hide from the praying mantis. The ferocious insects are known to feast on a veritable buffet of living creatures, including everything […]
A Hadza woman plays the honey stick public goods game inside the researchers’ vehicle. (Photo: Eduardo Acevedo) Once upon a time (er, yesterday), we might have thought a character trait like generosity was something deeply ingrained by life experiences or even decided by a person’s genes. But research today in Current Biology suggests that a […]
Two rhesus macaques, though not the two shown here, have helped scientists identify a brain region important for risky decision-making. (Credit: izarizhar/shutterstock) Researchers have identified a key brain area associated with high-risk behavior, thanks to two monkeys they trained to gamble. Before the rhesus monkeys could start gambling, they had to learn the researchers’ system […]
Photo Source: Creative Commons, Nicolas Henderson on Twitter The Virginia Beach Blue Water Task Force works all twelve months of the year. When we visit the beach, water quality is the last thing most of us want to worry about. Virginia Beach receives more than 15 million tourists each year, and both the state Department […]
A new study of stars in the Milky Way reveals evidence of a cosmic near miss collision with a smaller galaxy sometime in the last billion years. (Credit: ESA) Our Milky Way galaxy holds hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those suns were formed locally from clouds of gas — at the rate of […]
(Credit: g-stockstudio/shutterstock) Firms in competitive industries are often seen as cutthroat and intense places to work. But while the work might be intense, the employees tend to trust and cooperate with each other, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances. The high stakes appear to bring about group cohesiveness, which might have deep […]
An animation of before and after images acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite shows flooding in the wake of Florence across southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina. (Source: Modified from CIMSS Satellite Blog) You’ve probably seen imagery shot in the Carolinas showing the devastating flooding that Hurricane Florence left its wake. Now, check out what that flooding […]
(Credit: Aerovista Luchtfotografie/Shutterstock) An adult albatross can spend days without ever touching the ground. Long wings that lock into place provide enormous amounts of lift. And a keen sense for thermals and air currents lets the birds soar with little energy expenditure. Sleeping, eating, drinking and bathing all take place on the wing, over the course of […]
Scientists studied captured shipments of ivory tusks and managed to tie them to cartels. (Credit: Joe Mercier/shutterstock) Nearly 40,000 elephants die each year from illegal poaching orchestrated by large criminal organizations. The perpetrators are after ivory — the white, teeth-like material that forms the main part of elephants’ tusks. It also funds an illicit $4 […]
via GIPHY Every single episode of MacGyver would have been ruined had he gotten his hands on a few patches of a new robotic skin developed by researchers at Yale University. A diversion to distract cartel enforcers? Wrap a stick of dynamite in robotic skin and it’ll walk itself around the corner and explode. Snatch […]
September 2006 MODIS image of southern California taken by the Aqua satellite. NASA Earth Observatory. The revolution in how we survey and image the surface of the Earth has had profound impacts on the geosciences. This shouldn’t be a shock to anyone as that’s what geoscientists do — study the Earth — and as we […]
Skywatchers have been enjoyed views of the Crab Nebula for nearly 1,000 years. (Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)) In late spring in the year 1054, a strange light appeared in the sky in what we would now call the constellation Taurus the Bull. It was a new star, where no star had […]