A small bone structure that developed from human skeletal stem cells. Blue coloring indicates cartilage, brown represents bone marrow and yellow shows bone. (Credit: Chan and Longaker et al.) If only we could regrow our broken bones like Harry Potter, Skele-gro style. Or, at the very least, heal up like a limb-regenerating newt. Alas, we […]
Neanderthal skulls (left) were on average slightly larger and differently shaped and than modern human skulls (right). (Credit: Weaver, Roseman and Stringer; Journal of Human Evolution Volume 53, Issue 2, August 2007) Neanderthals had bigger brains than people today. In any textbook on human evolution, you’ll find that fact, often accompanied by measurements of endocranial […]
A male Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) surveys its territory in Iran’s Golestan National Park. (Credit: Behzad Farahanchi ) Hana Raza has never seen a Persian leopard. But thanks to her, we know the big cats still roam the Zagros Mountains of Kurdistan. After four decades of war in Iraq, the species was thought to […]
The Large Hadron Collider is looking for dark matter candidates. Credit: CERN Dark matter research is unsettling. Scientists were unnerved when they first noticed that galaxies don’t rotate by the same physics as a spinning plate. The stars at a galaxy’s edge rotate faster than expected. And their motion can only be explained by a […]
A portion of TESS’ first light image, showing the Large Magellanic Cloud (right) and the bright star R Doradus. (Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched April 18, headed for an orbit that takes it out to about the distance of the Moon at its apogee. Just a few weeks later, it began […]
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 […]