Ceres Isn’t the Icy Dwarf Planet We Thought It Was

Whether it’s extreme climate change, an impending asteroid impact, scientific curiosity or even space tourism, there are compelling reasons to think about calling Mars our second home. But before expanding humanity’s cosmic real estate holdings, scientists will need to make the Red Planet feel a little more like our blue marble. That, in a nutshell, is the goal of researchers thinking about ways to terraform another planet. Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, has suggested we nuke the

The ‘Dorsal Straddle’ Is a Newly Discovered Froggy Sex Position
Bombay night frogs have added a new chapter to the Anuran Kama Sutra. There are roughly 6,600 species of Anurans – frogs and toads –worldwide, but for all that variety, these amphibians stick to one of six mating positions when it’s time to make more frogs and toads. But Bombay night frogs, Nyctibatrachus humayuni, aren’t like other frogs; instead, mating couples wriggle into a newly discovered, seventh sex position, that researchers christened the “dorsal straddle”. Don’t be surprised

Everything Worth Knowing About … Human Origins
The skeletons in our closet.

Having a ‘Bird Brain’ Is Actually a Compliment
Calling a person bird-brained isn’t the insult to intelligence it used to be. Sure, bird brains are small, but, according to a new study, their surprising intellect might arise from packing more neural connections into a smaller package. Some birds excel at tasks believed to require “higher thought,” such as planning for the future, using tools and recognizing themselves in mirrors. Birds accomplish these challenges at a level that matches or exceeds primates’ problem-solving skills, desp

Everything Worth Knowing About … Sleep Disorders
Don’t let these ailments keep you up at night.

Surface melting of snow and ice in Greenland explodes as temperatures soar to record levels
With parts of Greenland experiencing record high temperatures of late, melting of snow and ice at the surface has been skyrocketing. This follows a record low extent of Arctic sea ice in May, and other troublesome signs that global warming is taking off in the high north. The satellite image above of Greenland’s southwest coast shows what’s happening at the surface: numerous blue melt ponds, and the telltale grayish-blue coloration indicative of melting snow and ice. (Make sure to clic

The Four-Dimensional Brain?
“The brain is a three dimensional object.” It would seem that this is one of the least controversial facts about the brain, something we can all agree on. But now, in a curious new paper, researchers Arturo Tozzi and James F. Peters suggest that the brain might have an extra dimension: Towards a fourth spatial dimension of brain activity From topology, a strong concept comes into play in understanding brain functions, namely, the 4D space of a ‘‘hypersphere’s torus’’, undetectable by observ

Mammatus clouds catch fire during blazing Niwotian sunset
I know what you’re probably thinking. Yulsman totally manipulated this sunset image in Photoshop. But actually, this is the JPG file straight out of the camera (a SONY A7R with a Zeiss zoom lens attached). The camera’s JPG processing algorithm probably punched up the vibrance of the colors a little, and shifted the white balance a bit toward yellow.  But quite honestly, this is close to what the sky looked like last night from my deck in Niwot, Colorado after a series of thunderstorms had

Beetle Moms Make Anti-Aphrodisiac to Keep Dads Focused on Parenting
“Not tonight, honey,” says the female burying beetle, chewing up a mouthful of mouse carcass before spitting it into the mouth of a begging larva. For the first few days of their babies’ lives, burying beetles co-parent. They devote themselves to keeping their squirming larvae alive. That means mating and laying more eggs would be a waste of energy. And to make sure males get that message, females emit a pheromone that turns them off. “It is quite surprising,” says University of Ulm be

Destiny Isn’t Completely Written in Your Genes
The turn of the 21st century was an exciting time in the history of genetics. The first sequencing of the human genome was completed in 2003 and it provided numerous insights to the scientific community and society in general. In 2000, during his final State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton made a point of how all humans share 99.9 percent of our genome — it’s actually more like 99.7 percent. By honing in on the genetic variants, or mutations, that exist for certain genes i

Visiting Dmanisi, Earliest Hominin Site Beyond Africa
Pop quiz, hotshot: what are the most significant fossil sites for piecing together the story of human evolution? Your list probably included Tanzania’s early hominin-rich Olduvai Gorge and Hadar, Lucy’s hometown in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Maybe you thought of the Rising Star cave system, which hogged hominin headlines last year with the announcement of the Homo naledi finds within. Or you went old school, naming Trinil, where a young Dutchman uncovered Java Man, aka Homo erectus, mor

Goodbye to Night: 80 Percent of Humanity Lives Under Light Polluted Skies
The beauty of the night sky is rapidly fading, and an update to the first global light pollution map, created 15 years ago, makes that painfully clear. The new atlas revealed that more than 80 percent of the world lives under light-polluted skies – that rises to 99 percent of the population in the United States and Europe. One-third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way. As the new map shows, the night sky is slowly retreating to the glow of artificial light. Losing the Night

What Do the Stars Look Like from Mars?
The Mars-like deserts of the American Southwest are some of Earth’s most iconic stargazing grounds. Far from pestering city lights and free from regular cloud cover, they provide a starry-skied sanctuary for lovers of the night. So, it would stand to reason that the deserts of Mars itself would be even more idyllic. After all, there’s no light pollution and cloud cover is hard to come by. And to some degree, that’s true. It doesn’t get much darker than nighttime on the Red Planet. And

Now When You Talk to a Plant, It Can ‘Talk’ Back
Some gardeners swear by the practice of talking to their plants, and it’s plausible that there’s something to this old adage — there’ve been studies, but nothing conclusive. But for those clinging to an old green-thumb legend, technology is on your side. A new project from Helene Steiner, an artist-in-residence at Microsoft’s Studio 99 program, hijacks the electrical impulses and chemical signals from plants in a creative way. Called Project Florence, her system allows a person to type in

Decoding Faces from the Brain
In a fascinating new paper, researchers Hongmi Lee and Brice A. Kuhl report that they can decode faces from neural activity. Armed with a brain scanner, they can reconstruct which face a participant has in mind. It’s a cool technique that really seems to fit the description of ‘mind reading’ – although the method’s accuracy is only modest. Here’s how they did it. Lee and Kuhl started out with a set of over 1000 color photos of different faces. During an fMRI scan, these images were shown to

Animation of satellite images shows smoke from a Russian wildfire getting sucked into a weather system vortex
Wildfire activity in Russia’s Far East has seen something of an upsurge this spring compared to the same period last year. One of the most dramatic of the fires has been burning along the west coast of Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Wildfire is no stranger to the peninsula, but this one has created a bit of a remote sensing spectacle. To see what I mean, check out the animation of satellite images above. Make sure to click on it to view a larger, higher quality version. The penin

Herpes and Constipation: Firming Up a Loose Connection
Constipation and an inability to empty the bladder are rare, but not unheard of, complaints from patients who acquire a genital herpes infection. The thing is, doctors couldn’t say how these seemingly unrelated symptoms were linked to the infection. Now, a team led by Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has discovered a mechanism that directly ties the viral infection with gastrointestinal complications. The

Antarctic Seal ‘Researchers’ Dive Deep for Science
Seal scientists may not realize it, but they’re collecting valuable data in places that humans don’t have easy access to. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology published the results of a study in Antarctica that was aided by elephant seals who call the region home. Elephant seals outfitted with temporary sensors made thousands of dives to log data on depth, water temperature and salinity, and the information they gathered helped researchers better understand the dynamics

How I Helped Turn Carbon Dioxide into Stone
To halt climate change and prevent dangerous warming, we ultimately have to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. While the world is making slow progress on reducing emissions, there are more radical options, such as removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and storing them underground. In a paper published today in Science my colleagues and I report on a successful trial converting carbon dioxide (CO₂) to rock and storing it underground in Iceland. Although we trialled

Although its impacts on the weather still reverberate, El Niño has now officially gone bye bye
Forecasters lean toward the emergence of a weak to ‘borderline moderate’ La Niña in the fall If you live in Texas — or Indonesia, for that matter — it might be difficult to believe, but El Niño truly has gone away. Record-setting rainfall has recently caused devastating floods in Texas. Meanwhile, drought continues in parts of Southeast Asia. And both have been linked to lingering impacts of El Niño on atmospheric circulation patterns. But as the animation above illustrates, January’s

Table Talk: How the Elements Got Their Names
The seventh row of the periodic table is complete, resplendent with four new names for the elements 113, 115, 117 and 118. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (the organization charged with naming the elements) has suggested these should be called nihonium (Nh); moscovium (Mv); tennessine (Ts) and oganesson (Og) and is expected to confirm the proposal in November. The three former elements are named after the regions where they were discovered (and Nihonium references Ni

Arctic sea ice continues its downward spiral, reaching a record low extent for the month of May
If the trend continues, sea ice coverage will decline to an historic minimum by summer’s end in September Back in mid-May, unusually warm conditions, and shrinking sea ice coverage, prompted Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center to predict that “the Arctic is going to go through hell this year.” Almost a month later, that prediction seems right on track. Each and every day during May, the extent of Arctic sea ice shrunk by an area roughly equal to the state of West Virg

Watch: How Mosquitoes Drill Into Your Flesh With Six Needles
Mosquitoes are one of my favorite venomous animals. These natural phlebotomists have efficient venoms which allow them to effortlessly violate our most precious tissue—our blood—while manipulating our immune system to remain under the radar. You can just imagine  how hard that venom has to work to hide the invading mouthparts, which poke around in search of a suitable capillary, as this awesome video from KQED’s Deep Look shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD8SmacBUcU Mosquitoes don’t

Dolphins Cooperate by Talking It Out
How do you know when animals are working together? Just because two animals got something done jointly doesn’t mean they cooperated. They might have succeeded by dumb luck, or trial and error. Scientists who study animal minds, though, would really like to know when cooperation happens on purpose—and how animal partners manage to communicate with each other. Studies in capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees hinted that the primates coordinated their actions by glancing at each other. (But this

Return to Flores: “Hobbit” Hominin Ancestor Discovered
A partial jaw, a bit of skull and half a dozen teeth: this handful of fossil finds from Indonesia might not seem like much, but at 700,000 years old they have delivered a definitive smackdown to Hobbit haters (and I’m not talking about Gollum). The small assemblage of fossils, belonging to at least three individuals, proves once and for all that Homo floresiensis, popularly known as “the Hobbit,” was a distinct species. What’s more, these fossils, described today in Nature, refine the evo

How One Strain of Plague Bacterium Ravaged Eurasia
Even today, the specter of the Black Death looms over society. The disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, began a deadly march through Eurasia starting in the mid-14th century, killing hundreds of thousands along the way. And researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History believe that a single strain of the bacterium is to blame, and it remains the source of modern plague epidemics. The disease was likely introduced in Europe in 1334 via fleas that h

The Key Enzymes Behind Methane-Munching Microbial Communities
Stable isotope probing proteomics (proteomic SIP) combines advanced analytical technology, computational wizardry, and experimental design to address one of microbial ecology’s most fundamental questions: which organisms are present and what exactly are they doing? In a recent study, some colleagues and I gave this method one of its biggest tests to date, adding isotopically labeled nitrogen to methane-infused deep-sea sediment from the Hydrate Ridge methane seep. By tracing this

Archerfish Can Recognize Faces, Too
Next time you peer into the water, be careful — the fish looking back at you might know more about you than you realize. In a study published Tuesday in Science Reports, researchers from the United Kingdom and Australia trained a species of fish to recognize individual human faces. While it took a bit of practice, the archerfish could pick out specific faces from a lineup with reasonable accuracy, indicating that animals can learn to recognize faces even if they don’t possess the neural h

Yes, We Can Take the Gravitational Wave Hunt to Space
Scientists at the European Space Agency have successfully engineered the quietest environment in the known universe, paving the way for deep-space gravitational wave detectors. In December 2015, the 22-nation ESA launched the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft to determine if it’s possible for two gold-platinum cubes to remain perfectly still, relative to each other, as they orbited the sun. That meant shielding the cubes from all disturbances — even forces as minuscule as the gravitational pull

Everything Worth Knowing About … Scientific Dating Methods
This dating scene is dead.

Everything Worth Knowing About … How We Learn
Amnesiacs, memory champions and rats, oh my!

We’re Getting Serious About Mining Asteroids
As humanity gobbles up natural resources to satisfy the demands of economic expansion, a growing number of enterprising corporations are eyeing outer space as the next source of valuable commodities. Asteroid mining is making the leap from science fiction novels and into corporate boardrooms as new technologies bring the idea within reach. We’ve already landed a probe on a comet, satisfying the first requirement for potential mining activities. Figuring our how to extract potential resour

eARTh: The North Atlantic Ocean comes alive in beautiful blue and green swirls of painterly phytoplankton
Billions of tiny plant-like organisms have painted the seas in a swirling pattern reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting, The Starry Night. It’s part of an annual event — a bloom of phytoplankton that spreads north in the Atlantic Ocean, peaking in late spring. On June 3, the clouds parted just enough south of Iceland to reveal part of this year’s bloom to NASA’s Terra satellite. Using photosynthesis to capture solar energy, phytoplankton form the basis of marine food webs.

Everything Worth Knowing About … Black Holes
Get sucked in!

Academic Freedom: Keep Lawyers Out Of Scientific Publishing
Over at Retraction Watch, we learn about the strange case of the author who is preparing to sue a journal for retracting his paper. In 2014, Jonathan Bishop published an article called Transforming the UK Home Office into a Department for Homeland Security in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (JHSEM), a journal operated by De Gruyter publishers. In April this year, JHSEM retracted Bishop’s piece, saying in explanation that “The journal re-reviewed the above-listed arti

Special Section: Everything Worth Knowing
In this special issue of Discover, we dive into the hottest topics in science, and boil them down to the essentials.

Killer Whale Culture Shapes Their Evolution
When it comes to evolution in modern humans, environmental pressures have almost all been accounted for — instead of adapting our bodies we can come up with technological solutions that work just as well. But our culture, the shared set of activities, behaviors and beliefs that define our lives, still provides a degree of variation that could serve to imprint itself on our bodies in the long term. Culture extends to other animals, too. Social groups often display patterns of behavior uniq

The Myth of the Optimism Bias?
Are humans natural, irrational optimists? According to many psychologists, humans show a fundamental optimism bias, a tendency to underestimate our chances of suffering negative events. It’s said that when thinking about harmful events, such as contracting cancer, most people believe that their risk is lower than that of ‘the average person’. So, on average, people rate themselves as safer than the average. Moreover, people are also said to show biased belief updating. Faced with evidence that t

The Chemical Reactions That Make Food Taste Awesome
Have you ever wondered how freshly baked bread gets its golden brown crust and why it smells so good? Or how nondescript green berries turn into beautiful brown coffee beans with a rich alluring aroma? The answers to these questions lie in a series of complex of chemical reactions, known as Maillard reactions, which give many foods their familiar flavors and colors. These sensory properties even guide us in how we choose foods and help create our initial perceptions of their quality. Tas

The Story Behind the World’s Highest Sky Dive