Space Is the Place to View Meteor Showers

A single gulp of ocean water, or roughly three teaspoons, is all it will take for athletes and tourists to contract potentially deadly diseases at the 2016 Rio Olympics. That’s the consensus of a recent study commissioned by the Associated Press looking at levels of viruses, bacteria and other microbes in the water of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay — home of historic Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. The study, carried out by an unnamed researcher at Brazil’s Feevale University, reported

Space Submarines Could Swim in Extraterrestrial Seas
One of the most profound and exciting breakthroughs in planetary science in the last two decades has been the discovery of liquid methane lakes on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, and liquid oceans under the icy surfaces of many of the giant gas planets’ other moons. Thrillingly, these some of these “waters” may actually harbor life. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about them. Probes such as Juno and Cassini can only get so close. Also, subsurface oceans can only be sensed in

Fecal Feasts Bring Earwig Families Together
A steaming bowl of fresh feces isn’t a meal that will bring the family together over the holidays. But for many animals, fecal consumption is a way of life. The technical term for eating poo is coprophagy, from the Greek kopros for “dung”, and phagein, “to eat”. Though we most commonly associate coprophagy with domestic dogs, many other animals are known to indulge. Rabbits re-ingest their own droppings to extract extra nutrients; dung beetles have gone a step further and built a speci

A Darwinian Perspective on the Female Orgasm
A new study provides an interesting explanation for one of biology’s most enduring mysteries: the female orgasm. The male side of the equation is easy enough — if sex feels good, they’ll have more of it. For males intent on sowing their wild oats, a pleasurable response to ejaculation makes sense. For females, however, success at reproducing is not tied to having an orgasm, so does it still serve a physiological purpose?  Orgasmic Origins Obscure In a paper, published Sunday in the Jour

Paleopathology: The Hard Life and Times of a Hadrosaur
Life was rough back in the Late Cretaceous, some 70 million years ago. The constant threat of predation, the relentless hunt for food, no convenience stores or acute care walk-in clinics. And for at least one particular hadrosaur, a variety of plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur, things got particularly nasty when it developed septic arthritis in the elbow of one of its forelimbs. But what was a lousy break for a long-dead dinosaur is a boon to science today: X-ray microtomography (XMT) sc

History’s Strangest Baldness ‘Cures’
For most people, baldness wouldn’t make it into the Top Ten Worst Things Ever; that list is more likely to be dominated by Ebola, cancer, dementia, and Kevin Federline’s Playing with Fire album. Nonetheless, it is a condition that countless men find distressing as they endure taunts like “Mr. Clean,” “cue ball,” or “chrome dome.” Surprisingly, attempts at curing baldness do not originate in our modern, superficial society. Actually, when it comes to palliating the naturally depilated pate

From a Cosmic Perspective, Is Life on Earth Premature?
In universal timescales, our solar system has only been around for a small portion of time as the universe is 13.8 billion years old while the Earth is just 4.5 billion years old. It is thought that there could be life out in the universe that developed billions of years before we did, but a new study predicts that life on Earth is premature. A new study to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Avi Loeb, the lead author of the study from the Harvard-Smithsoni

Some Surprising Authors of Psychology Papers
In a fascinating new paper, Scott O. Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn discuss 78 Surprising Authors of Psychological Publications. The paper is a list of celebrities and other notable figures who, at one time or another, have published an academic paper in psychology. Did you know that Lisa Kudrow, aka Phoebe from Friends, was co-author on a 1994 paper about ‘Handedness and Headache’ published in the journal Cephalalgia? Well, thanks to Lilienfeld and Lynn, now you do. Other actors who have a

Jack White’s Label Spins Carl Sagan Vinyl in Near-space
Jack White and Third Man Records have set a record for the highest record ever played. Along with Students and Teachers in Near Space, the former White Stripes rocker and his label sent a specially-pressed recording of the Carl Sagan-sampling “A Glorious Dawn” nearly 100,000 feet into the stratosphere via a weather balloon. A bespoke turntable on the Icarus Craft kept the record spinning the whole time, allowing White and his collaborators to claim the title for high altitude listening se

How Astronomers Plan to Solve the Mystery of the “Alien Megastructure Star”
If you look in enough places, eventually you’ll find something profoundly strange. That’s been a reliable rule of thumb through the history of science, and last year it proved dramatically true again for astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. While digging through data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has been monitoring 150,000 stars for signs of orbiting planets, she realized that one of these things is not like the others. A single star in that set, formally catalogued as KIC 8462852 but i

The Bad Sausage & The Discovery of Botulism
“A lot kills, a little cures,” wrote the father of toxicology, and botulinum toxin is the poster child for this important pharmaceutical concept. Depending on the dosage and route, this potent bacterial toxin is either a devastating foodborne poison – one of the most deadly toxins known to man, capable of causing paralyzing death – or a wildly popular wrinkle antidote, harnessed and wielded in the pursuit of clearer skin. Yes, botulinum toxin, or Botox, is best known for its use in cosmet

The End of Ego-Depletion Theory?
It’s not been a good month for the theory of ego-depletion – the idea that self-control is a limited resource that can be depleted by overuse. Two weeks ago, researchers reported evidence of bias in the published literature examinig the question of whether glucose can reverse ego-depletion. Now, the very existence of the ego-depletion phenomenon has been questioned by an international collaboration of psychologists who conducted a preregistered replication attempt (RRR). The results have just

Seen from space: eight days of a blazing California wildfire
The Soberanes Fire has scorched an area twice as large as Manhattan. Watch nearly its full duration so far in this animation of satellite images. Since it started on July 22, the Soberanes Fire along California’s Big Sur coast has scorched at least 33,668 acres — an area nearly two and third times the size of Manhattan. Along the way it has destroyed 68 structures and resulted in the death of one bulldozer operator. More than 5,000 firefighters are battling the blaze, equipped with 511 f

Americans Fear Enhanced Humans Will Worsen Inequality
Americans have long celebrated fictional superheroes with extraordinary powers such as flight, superhuman strength and incredible speed. In real life, a survey shows Americans seem wary of technologies leading to enhanced humans with better brainpower or greater athletic abilities. Many Americans worry that biomedical technologies such as gene editing, brain chip implants, and synthetic blood will increase the wealth inequality that already exists between “haves” and “have nots,” accordin

Atlantic hurricanes: Is the calm before the storms ending?
High sea surface temperatures fuel hurricanes — and right now, the tank is brimming. When will the season really get rolling? There are no Atlantic hurricanes on the eastern horizon just yet, but far across the sea from the United States, something is definitely beginning to stir. More and more weather disturbances are arising over Africa, and propagating westward into the tropical Atlantic Ocean. “As anticipated, we are seeing a bit more activity appear now over the tropical [Atlanti

Lost or Found? A Stick Chart From the Marshall Islands
This post originally appeared in the online anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Follow @SAPIENS_org on Twitter to discover more of their work. In a recent blog post, I focused on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and mused on how we ever got along without high-tech navigational aids. GPS units became common in cars and phones only in the last 15 years or so. I remember when a road trip required a stop at the local American Automobile Association office to gather free maps of the planned r

Whollydooleya, Batman! The Tasmanian Devil’s Bigger, Badder Cousin
Thank you, Australia. One of your many contributions to the world is an amazing collection of unique animals past and present that, let’s be honest, are just fun. Adorable echidnas, sweet little pademelons (you cannot be angry when you say their name…try it), koalas, wombats and, of course, the Tasmanian devils, what I like to think of as lapdogs of Mordor. The devils, often misunderstood and now tragically imperiled by disease, are cousins to the latest fossil find out of the island na

Why Sticker Price Matters for Self-Driving Cars
Many Americans expect self-driving cars to become more popular than regular cars in the next few decades. But much of that optimistic assumption depends on the sticker price of driverless vehicles and how much drivers would be willing to pay to replace their old rides with robot car chauffeurs. Under some circumstances, a recent study found that not even half of U.S. passenger cars would be self-driving cars within thirty years. Many attempts to predict the popularity of driverless vehicl

Talkative Orangutan Shows Scientists How Language Evolved
An orangutan named Rocky is using “wookies” to reveal new insights into the origins of language. In experiments conducted by a researcher at Amsterdam University, Rocky learned and recited a basic vocabulary of sounds, producing vocalizations no orangutan is known to make. By learning to mimic his human instructor, this talkative primate is lending support to one of the leading theories of language evolution. Repeat After Me Adriano Lameira, now a professor in the department of anthropo

Did Traveling to the Moon Take a Toll on Astronauts’ Hearts?
Astronauts who explore deep space may be more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease later in their lives. That’s the implication of a new study, which found that Apollo astronauts, who had flown to the moon in their 30s, were more likely to die of cardiovascular problems in their 50s and 60s than astronauts who flew missions in low Earth orbit. In low Earth orbit—the domain of ISS and the former Space Shuttle flights—Earth’s magnetic field blocks radiation from further out in sp

Your Nose May Have Drugs in It, the Antibiotic Kind
The human nose is a battleground for bacteria and some of them could prove to be our allies. Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic, produced by nose-dwelling bacteria, that kills antibiotic-resistant superbugs, including MRSA. The study, published in Nature, shows that the human microbiome — the microorganisms living on and within us — could be an important source for new antibiotics, desperately needed as infectious bacteria become resistant to our current antibiotic drugs.

These Ants Would Definitely Win a Sword Fight
What do you get if you take an ant and add a couple of scimitars to its back? You’d get an ant that fits nicely into Pheidole cervicornis, a diverse group of ants in Indonesia with wicked-looking spikes adorning their bodies. Looking something like the ninja warriors of the ant world, these guys have another unique feature as well: giant heads and jaws that they use to break apart and transport large portions of food. Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

Deer Line Up North-South, Whether Relaxing or Running
If you’re ever lost in a remote European forest, you might be able to get your bearings by finding a herd of roe deer. These animals like to align themselves roughly north-south, whether they’re standing still or fleeing danger. Roe deer are small, reddish or grayish grazers common in Europe and Asia. Petr Obleser, of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, and his coauthors studied the behavior of these skittish herbivores to look for evidence that they can sense the earth’s mag

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Big, Bad and Really Hot
Talk about extreme weather. The solar system’s biggest and baddest storm, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, is so loud and violent that it heats up the giant planet’s atmosphere. Above the storm, which has been raging for at least 300 years, the atmosphere is hundreds of degrees hotter than anywhere else on Jupiter. The warmth comes from within, according to a paper published in Nature today. So Hot in Here Orbiting hundreds of millions of miles from the sun, Jupiter is about three times toasti

The Myth of Human Adult Neurogenesis?
In a new paper that could prove explosive, Australian neuropathologists C. V. Dennis and colleagues report that they found very little evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans. In recent years, the idea that neurogenesis – the production of new neurons – occurs in specific regions of the adult brain has become widely accepted, and much discussed. Disruptions to neurogenesis have been proposed to play a role in stress, depression, and other disorders. However, Dennis et al. say that ne

From Jet Fuel to Medicine, Tobacco Growers Turn a New Leaf
It is notorious for its role in the expansion and continuation of American slavery, and for its adverse health effects. The latter includes cardiovascular disease and various cancers, including lung cancer, the most common malignancy, underlying millions of deaths each year. Health officials, attorneys, and activists have spent decades targeting its industrial cultivators in an effort to limit its advertising and sale, particularly to minors. We are talking about tobacco. If at a frust

Dolly’s Clones Are Living Long, Healthy Lives
Twenty years ago, Dolly the sheep proved to the world that cloning was possible, but her poor health didn’t exactly engender much confidence in the process. However, her siblings, cloned from the same cell line, are serving as living proof that cloning is perhaps a viable, safe technology. They’re the equivalent of sheep senior citizens, and they’re still in good health. These four sheep cloned from Dolly’s cell line, as well as nearly a dozen other clones, are part of an ongoing study at

Ceres Should Have More Craters. So What Wiped Them Away?
Most dwarf planets and solar system bodies similar to Ceres’ size possess many large impact craters from billions of years of being bashed into by other space debris during the formation of the solar system. But one place where this isn’t the case? Ceres, the largest object in a field full of formation debris. In a new study published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) found that Ceres lacks the size and distribution of large crate

Close-up videos capture big, beautiful explosion on the Sun
A buildup of intensely tangled magnetic energy on the Sun suddenly let go two days ago, unleashing a massive explosion of radiation and super-hot plasma. The radiation explosion was the most powerful solar flare of 2016 so far. You can watch all the action close up in the video above, based on data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, or SDO. When the video starts, keep your eye on the bright active region toward the middle of the frame. It’s seething with energy. Abov

New Zealand Declares War on Rats, Weasels and Possums