Science: What Geeks are talking about from Discover Magazine

Prozac in the Water Makes Fighting Fish More Mellow
Had Teresa Dzieweczynski chosen to publish her recent findings as an updated children’s classic, rather than as a research paper, she could have titled it If You Give a Fish an Antidepressant. The book would probably be less charming than If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. But it would also be, unfortunately, more realistic. Our pharmaceuticals are steadily trickling into the homes of fish and other animals. And—as the hero of the original book could have told us, his house in disarray after fulf

Labels, Not Looks, Matter Most at the Dog Shelter
When potential dog owners visit a shelter, a whole range of factors affect which lucky animal they take home with them. Personality, activity levels, age and breed all go into the equation, depending on what pet owners are looking for. What pet owners are not looking for, however, are pit bulls. As a new study from researchers at Arizona State University shows, labeling a dog as a pit bull, all behavioral and personality observations aside, is enough to drastically alter how it is perceiv

Why Nuclear Fusion Is Always 30 Years Away
Nuclear fusion has long been considered the “holy grail” of energy research. It represents a nearly limitless source of energy that is clean, safe and self-sustaining. Ever since its existence was first theorized in the 1920s by English physicist Arthur Eddington, nuclear fusion has captured the imaginations of scientists and science-fiction writers alike. Fusion, at its core, is a simple concept. Take two hydrogen isotopes and smash them together with overwhelming force. The two atoms ov

How We Found the Dinosaur Doomsday Site
On March 22, 1991, David Kring stood at a podium at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston and revealed the exact location of the most important impact event in the past 100 million years. The dinosaur-killing space-rock struck Mexico’s present-day Yucatan Peninsula near the town of Chicxulub. By that time, most geologists already accepted Luis and Walter Alvarez’s once-wild theory that a 65-million-year-old, worldwide layer of iridium — a material common in asteroids, but

Our Closest View Yet of Ceres’ Bright Spots
Since April 2015, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been drawing ever closer to Ceres, and it’s now provided the closest view yet of the dwarf planet. Scientists on Tuesday unveiled images captured by Dawn from it lowest orbit at Ceres—some 240 miles above its surface—during the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. The latest set of images brings Ceres’ puzzling bright spots into sharper focus. The brightest area on Ceres is in the middle of the 57-mile-wide, 2-mile-deep Occat

Archaeologists Race Against Climate Change to Save Cultural Treasures
(This post originally appeared in the brand new, online anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Follow @SAPIENS_org on Twitter to discover more of their work.)  On a bright and buggy day in July 2014, Max Friesen, whiskered and encased in denim and Gore-Tex, inched across a stretch of tundra overlooking the East Channel of the Mackenzie River, where it unravels into the Arctic Ocean. The archaeologist pushed his way through a tangle of willow brush that grew thick atop the frozen soil sloping towa

Metallic Ink Shines in Ancient Herculaneum Scrolls
When Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 A.D., it buried the surrounding country, including the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum so quickly and completely that organic matter didn’t have time to burn. Instead, it transformed into carbon. While this was bad news for the inhabitants of the region, it was good news for historians: it preserved some of their papyrus scrolls as carbonized tubes — true carbon copies. The only problem with these artifacts is that most cannot be read, as unrolling them

Voyager: The Man Behind the Mission
Ed Stone’s relentless pursuit of the frontier has taken him to the edge of the solar system — and beyond.

Imagining a World Without Traffic Lights
Getting stuck in traffic, like death and taxes, is just part life for people who drive vehicles to get from point A to B. Traffic jams are the result of competition for a scarce and highly valuable resource — the open road, and by extension, our freedom to travel where and when we want. Our traffic woes are compounded, however, by human fallibility. Drivers are often reckless, distracted or overly cautious, and each small mistake on the road propagates throughout the whole system. With

The Rich, Frightening Diversity of the Bat “Virome”
Viral pandemics are one of the most fundamental, frightening threats to human health: they can emerge seemingly from nowhere, and spread like wildfire through the hyperconnected conduits of our globalized society. And while near-annual crises prompt reconsideration of local, regional, and global responses, preventing viral induction and spread in the first place represents another important area of focus. Hence the pervasive suspicion of bats – the most notorious of viral transmission age

The Man Who Fought a Bull With Mind Control
The investigator, dressed incongruously in sweater and tie and holding a small metal box, stands in a bullring. He taunts a bull with a gesture of his hand. Suddenly the bull faces him and charges. Taking a couple of steps back, the investigator presses a button on the box to send a radio signal, and the bull halts in mid-stride. It turns away. The animal’s natural aggression has evaporated. This risky behavior-control demonstration, conducted in Spain in 1963, was the signature experimen

From “Observations” to “Data”: The Changing Language of Science
Today we hear a lot about scientific data – data sharing, data integrity, and Big Data, are all hot topics in science. Yet is science really about “data”? Did scientists in the past talk about it as much as we do? To find out, I ran some PubMed searches to find papers published in the last century, 1915 to 2015. I searched for “data” and for other alternative terms that can be used to refer to scientific findings. Here’s a graph of the percentage of biomedical journal articles published e

Google Backs Away from Humanoid Robots
Google has not been shy about placing big bets on the future of robotics and artificial intelligence. But even the Silicon Valley giant may not feel ready to fully embrace humanoid robots and the uncomfortable questions they pose about the relationship between machines and humanity. Several robots shaped like humanoids or four-legged creatures were being developed by Boston Dynamics, a robotics company bought by Google for $500 million at the end of 2013. For years, Boston Dynamics has be

Making the Case for a Trip to the Ice Giants
An armada of spacecraft keep a constant watch on the Red Planet. But the ice giants — Uranus and Neptune — were explored close up for a matter of days in the 1980s. Mark Hofstadter of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory hopes to change that. He’s been tasked with studying the merits and engineering requirements for a major mission to study these outer solar system worlds. The space agency’s head of planetary sciences, James Green, announced the potential mission in 2015 and said its final

Do You Even Science? Edition 1: King Tut and Dinosaur Legs
It was a big week for science news, and we’re going to see if you’ve been keeping up with the headlines. In the first installment of our weekly science quiz, we’ve prepared a list of 10 questions pulled from from the week’s science news, including a few from our D-brief blog. Some of the hot topics this week included the infamous “Tully monster,” garbage-loving storks and a mystery in King Tut’s tomb. Have you been exercising your science muscle? Let’s find out.

Even Harmless Snakes Strike at Deadly Speed
Just because a snake can’t kill you doesn’t mean it’s slow on the draw. New research shows that harmless snakes strike just as quickly as venomous vipers do. The snakes hurl themselves at their targets so quickly, in fact, that a lesser animal would black out from the acceleration. Vipers have long been the presumed titleholders for strike speed, explains David Penning, a graduate student in biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. These snakes strike to kill, plunging their v

Computer Algorithm Can Spot a Drunken Tweeter
Drunk tweets, long considered an unfortunate, yet ubiquitous, byproduct of the social media age, have finally been put to good use. With the help of a machine-learning algorithm, researchers from the University of Rochester cross-referenced tweets mentioning alcohol consumption with geo-tagging information to broadly analyze human drinking behavior. They were able to estimate where and when people imbibed, and, to a limited extent, how they behaved under the influence. The experiment is m

Psychologists Throw Open The “File Drawer”
The ‘file drawer problem’ refers to the fact that in science, many results remain unpublished – especially negative ones. This is a problem because it produces publication bias. Now, a group of Belgian psychology researchers have decided to make a stand. In a bold move against publication bias, they’ve thrown open their own file drawer. In the new paper, Anthony Lane and colleagues of Leuven say that they’ve realized that over the years, “our publication portfolio has become less and less

Watch Live: Baby Bald Eagles Are Hatching in Washington, D.C.
The first of a pair of bald eagle eggs at the U.S. National Arboretum is expected to hatch today. Officials at the Arboretum say that cracks have already appeared in the first egg, and the chick is expected to emerge over the course of the next 12 to 48 hours. You can watch the tiny eaglet struggle out of its shell live courtesy of the DC Eagle Cam, hosted by the American Eagle Foundation. Bald Eagles Are Back They say a crack was first spotted in one of the shells Wednesday night a

Storks Ditch Migration for Landfill Luxuries
In recent years, more and more migratory storks have been stopping at landfills for a snack during their voyages. Now, it seems that some have decided to make the dump their permanent home. It’s hard to fault the storks for wanting to stop for a meal  — after all, they travel over a thousand miles from Europe to Northern Africa and back again every year. The mouth-watering smell of a garbage dump is certainly alluring, and the temptation proved too hard to resist for some storks. Instead

Driving: We’re Doing It Wrong
If you use a car to get around, every time you get behind the wheel you’re confronted with a choice: how will you navigate to your destination? Whether it’s a trip you take every day, such as from home to work, or to someplace you haven’t been before, you need to decide on a route. Transportation research has traditionally assumed that drivers are very rational and choose the optimal route that minimizes travel time. Traffic prediction models are based on this seemingly reasonable assumpt