New Zealand today announced an ambitious plan to rid the island nation of all invasive predators by 2050. The targeted creatures include rats, weasels, possums and ferrets, all introduced to the island by native settlers and Europeans. If successful, the proposal would eradicate every member of those species on the island in an attempt to restore a more natural ecosystem. It is estimated that some 25 million native birds are killed each year by invasive species, including New Zealand’s ic
Confessions of a Martian Rock
I look at rocks on Mars for a living—a lot of rocks. Because of this, I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what to expect and what not to expect when analyzing the chemical make-up of a Martian rock. You expect to find lots of basalt, the building block of all planets. What I didn’t expect were large amounts of manganese. So when my colleagues and I found exactly that on a Martian rock called “Caribou” back in 2013, we thought, “This has to be a mistake.” Caribou Conundrum Trace amounts o
The Sand Fire near L.A. has doubled in size, and with dry, gusty winds, extreme fire behavior is forecast today
With temperatures up to 97 degrees, humidity down at just 10 percent, and winds gusting as high as 30 miles per hour, the weather forecast today is not what firefighters battling the Sand Fire near Los Angeles might have hoped for. As the graphic above from the National Weather Service in L.A. shows, extremely dangerous fire behavior is in the offing today. SEE ALSO: Amazing time-lapse video of the Sand Fire now blazing in northern Los Angeles County Make sure to click on the link a
Satellite images capture California’s Sand Fire, blazing north of Los Angeles, and the Sobranes Fire near the Big Sur coast
Hot, dry and windy weather is fanning the flames of two California wildfires this evening, one just north of Los Angeles and the other near Carmel. The Sand Fire north of Los Angeles in the Santa Clarita area, seen in the animation above, has consumed at least 11,000 acres. That number will almost certainly grow in the coming hours. Earlier today I posted an astonishing timelaspe video of the Sand Fire, shot last night by Mo Sabawi. Check it out here: Amazing time-lapse video of the
Amazing time-lapse video of the Sand Fire now blazing in northern Los Angeles County
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1gEDHX5N0 The Sand Fire started yesterday at about 2 p.m. near Santa Clarita, California and has since exploded to 11,000 acres in hot and dry conditions, according to the latest report on InciWeb. Once some imagery of the area from the Terra and Aqua satellites is available, my plan now is to come back later with a new, more detailed post. For now, check out this absolutely stunning timelapse video of the blaze shot last night by Mo Sabawi and posted
A New Map of the Brain: What Does It Mean?
A new Nature paper has earned a lot of media attention, unusually given that it’s a fairly technical and ‘basic’ piece of neuroscience. In the paper, researchers Matthew F. Glasser and colleagues present a new parcellation (or map) of the human cerebral cortex, breaking the cortex down into 180 areas per hemisphere – many more than conventional maps. But is this, as Nature dubbed it, “the ultimate brain map”? To generate their map, Glasser et al. first downloaded 210 people’s data from
A blanket of smoke from fires in Siberia is so huge it can be seen from nearly 1 million miles away in space
It’s a tad faint, but a smudge of smoke is clearly visible in the image below, captured by a spacecraft in deep space The Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft hovers between the Earth and Sun, keeping a constant eye on our planet’s sunlit side from about a million miles away. Yet even from that extremely distant vantage point (called Lagrange Point 1), DSCOVR’S camera was able to discern a broad blanket of smoke from wildfires raging in Siberia. Look for the smoke within the circ
Grassy Trampolines Are Appearing in Siberia’s Tundra
There’s trouble brewing in Siberia. Or, should we say, bubbling. As the Siberian Times reports, researchers working on a remote island off the coast of Siberia stumbled upon an unusual sight: In some places, the normally solid tundra is turning into a grassy trampoline. The cause of the wobbly patches is likely due to climate change. Permafrost Unleashed Much of the ground in Siberia is permafrost — soil that remains frozen year-round, except for a small layer on the surface. This also
Video of Evaporating Booze Droplet Looks Like a Tiny Planet
Most of us don’t give much thought to drops of liquid that end up outside our drinking glasses. But physicists care a lot about liquid droplets, and study their whole lifespans—from the first splash or drip to the moment a drop disappears. Liquids that contain three different substances, though, haven’t been studied as much. Detlef Lohse, a physicist at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and his colleagues took a deep dive into one such liquid: ouzo. Ouzo is a mixture of wate
Venus Is Messing With Halley’s Comet
If you’re waiting for Halley’s comet to show up exactly 75 years after its 1986 appearance, you may be disappointed. The ball of ice has an orbit that varies by months or even years. And new research suggests that Venus is responsible for the comet’s variations today, rather than the more massive planet Jupiter. “Comet Halley has been observed throughout history, all the way back to 240 BC by the Chinese,” Tjarda Boekholt, an astrophysicist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, tol
What We’re Learning from the World’s Oldest Calculator
When we talk of the history of computers, most of us will refer to the evolution of the modern digital desktop PC, charting the decades-long developments by the likes of Apple and Microsoft. What many don’t consider, however, is that computers have been around much longer. In fact, they date back millennia, to a time when they were analogue creations. Today, the world’s oldest known “computer” is the Antikythera mechanism, a severely corroded bronze artifact which was found at the beginni
How Birds and Honey Hunters Stick Together
When members of the Yao tribe in Mozambique set off to search for wild honey, they don’t go alone. To find hidden bee hives, the tribesmen enlist the help of expert guides, birds native to the African savanna appropriately named “honeyguides” (Indicator indicator). At the outset of a hunt, the Yao will call out with a distinctive vocalization consisting of a sustained trill followed by an emphatic grunt, best described as a “brrr-hm” sound. If they’re lucky, one of the small, brown bir
After Rare Event, 2 Earth-sized Exoplanets Are Looking More Habitable
TRAPPIST-1 may well be one of the closest stars to look for life in our own backyard, thanks to three planets in its habitable zone. Now, we’re one step closer to understanding if those planets could hold life, thanks to a new study published today in Nature. Using data gathered from the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers at MIT witnessed two occultation events from the innermost planets, TRAPPIST-1b and 1c. The two had near-simultaneous transit events on May 4, 2016 just 12 minutes a
Meet Murusraptor: The Supermodel of Megaraptors
Want to find some awesome dinosaur species new to science? Head south. South America is clearly the place to be these days, with Patagonian predator Murusraptor barrosaensis the latest intriguingly odd animal to stomp onto the paleoscene. Like fellow Argentine Gualicho shinyae, announced last week, Murusraptor is known from the partial skeleton of a single specimen. And while Gualicho made headlines for its shorty-short forelimbs, Murusraptor is like those models in perfume ads: a leggy myst
When Republicans and Democrats Started Speaking a Different Language
If someone proposed a “death tax”, how likely would you be to vote for it? What if we called it an “estate tax”? The words used to frame arguments can play an important role in shaping opinions of important issues — “death” and “estate” can yield two different interpretations of the same concept. That the kinds of words we use to build an argument is important has long been known, but a new study led by a researcher at Stanford University suggests that politicians are playing word games a
The Eye Can Spy a Single Photon
The human eye is sensitive enough pick out a single photon of light in otherwise complete darkness. Light-sensitive cells called rods, located in the back of your eye, can react to single photons, but that’s not the same as actually seeing the light. Sight, in the way that we think of consciously perceiving a visual, requires the retina and the brain to process those signals. For decades, researchers have wondered how little light the human eye could actually detect. Now, it turns out tha
The first half of 2016 was the warmest such period by far in a record dating back 137 years
Global warming continues, but with El Niño’s passing, Earth’s fever has moderated a bit This past month nudged out June 2015 as the warmest on record, according to data just released by NASA. That makes the first six months of 2016 the warmest first half of any year since 1880. June’s record warmth also means we’ve experienced nine months in a row of record setting temperatures. A separate analysis released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also shows that t
Can Ultrasound Diagnose Autism?
A paper makes the remarkable claim that autism could be detected through the use of ultrasound to peer beneath the skull. This paper is from 2014, but it just came to my attention. The authors of the piece, James Jeffrey Bradstreet, Stefania Pacini and Marco Ruggiero, studied 23 children with autism and 15 control children, who were unaffected siblings of the autistic group. Using ultrasound, the authors looked under the skull overlaying the brain’s temporal cortex. The ultrasound reveale
With Robotic Rectum, Doctors Practicing Prostate Exams Are No Longer In the Dark
The rectal exam is a delicate art to learn. Doctors perform this procedure entirely by feel, with just one finger. Students who are learning how to do such an exam have no way of showing their work to their teachers. And volunteer subjects are—unsurprisingly—rare. In the entire United Kingdom there’s only one person registered as a test subject for rectal exams, says Fernando Bello, who works on surgical computing and simulations at Imperial College London. Rectum models made of plastic e
Extinction Looms for Easter Island’s Only Remaining Native Species
On Easter Island, isolated in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, ten species of near microscopic insects are all that remain of the island’s native species — at least for now. Hidden in volcanic caves that dot the island, the endemic insects of Rapa Nui eke out an existence in an increasingly imperiled habitat. Their ancestral homes, fragile gardens of moss and ferns, are endangered by tourists flooding into the tiny island, and hordes of invasive species threaten to crowd them out. Th
T minus 3 weeks until <i>Venomous</i>, my first book, is out!
In just three weeks, my debut book—Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry—hits shelves in the U.S. The book is my tribute to the most notorious animals on the planet and the awesome weaponry they wield. I talk about the diversity of venomous animals, from the serpents, spiders and scorpions on land to the ocean’s snails, octopus and jellies. It’s a trip around the world and down to the molecular level to reveal how venoms work, and how they might hold the cures to our mo
Zika Virus Case in Utah Raises New Questions for Scientists
Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are scrambling to figure out how a Utah caregiver became ill with Zika. The virus is overwhelmingly transmitted via bites from infected mosquitoes, but can also spread through sexual contact. The case in Utah seems to be the result of something completely different, however, say state officials. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how the person became infected, but they working to figure what’s behind this latest twist in th
Illuminating Earth’s Largest Ecosystem
The following is one article in a series of dispatches from the E/V Nautilus. I served as a participating scientist on the Central California leg of the 2016 expedition; live footage of the Nautilus’ continuing exploration on the seafloor can be found at www.nautiluslive.org. During the Central California leg of the Exploration Vessel Nautilus’ 2016 season, our team of scientists and engineers explored previously unseen portions of the ocean, streaming the video live around the world. It’s pr
Everything Worth Knowing About … Dinosaurs
How to identify one in the wild. (Hey, it could happen.)
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