We Asked a NASA Technologist: Is There Weather on Mars? [Video]
Is there weather on Mars? Short answer: yes! And just like on Earth it varies wildly. Now, thanks to the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, or…
Science News
Americans Love the Billionaire, but Hate the Billionaires’ Club
How inequality is expressed matters for policy views. Americans may respect and admire how individual billionaires – think Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates – made…
Drinking Our Way to Sustainability – One Cup of Coffee at a Time
UMass Amherst researchers win NSF award to help re-envision the growing, selling and buying of coffee. Coffee, that savior of the underslept, comes with enormous…
Practice Makes Perfect, but Sleep Helps, Too: Reactivating Memories During Sleep Improves Motor Skills
Extra brain processing during sleep enhances learning of new motor skills. Practice makes perfect, but sleep helps, too. Learning and executing a new motor skill…
Oldest Footprints of Pre-Humans Identified in Crete – Six Million Years Old
Six million-year-old fossilized footprints on the island show the human foot had begun to develop. The oldest known footprints of pre-humans were found on the…
Food Waste Researcher: We Must Learn That Brown and Oddly-Shaped Fruit Isn’t Bad Fruit
We tend to avoid choosing apples with brown spots, assuming that they taste bad. But if we are to end food waste, we’ll need to…
Primates’ Ancestors May Have Left Trees To Survive Asteroid That Wiped Out the Dinosaurs
When an asteroid struck 66 million years ago and wiped out dinosaurs not related to birds and three-quarters of life on Earth, early ancestors of…
Mating Season Mishaps? Unprovoked Attacks by Venomous Olive Sea Snakes on Scuba Divers
Attacks by venomous Olive sea snakes on scuba divers may be misdirected courtship behaviors, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Scuba divers frequently…
Generating Optimal Decisions: How the Brain Deals With Uncertainty
Dedicated circuits evaluate uncertainty in the brain, preventing it from using unreliable information to make decisions. As we interact with the world, we are constantly…
Revisiting the Out of Africa Theory: New Narrative From Genetic Analysis and AI
Researchers from Estonia and Italy developed an innovative method by combining neural networks and statistics. Using this newly developed method, they refined the “Out of…
Our Brains Have a “Fingerprint” Too – But It Constantly Changes in Time
“I think about it every day and dream about it at night. It’s been my whole life for five years now,” says Enrico Amico, a…
Ancient Poop Shows People in Austria Drank Beer and Ate Blue Cheese 2,700 Years Ago
Human feces don’t usually stick around for long—and certainly not for thousands of years. But exceptions to this general rule are found in a few…
“Resonance Theory” – Could Consciousness All Come Down to the Way Things Vibrate?
Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and…
Genetics and Skeletal Biology Debunks Popular Theory of Native American Origins
Latest scientific findings suggest the ancestral Native American population does not originate in Japan, as believed by many archaeologists. A widely accepted theory of Native…
Biophysics Researchers Create Mathematical Model That Predicts Best Way To Build Muscle
Researchers have developed a mathematical model that can predict the optimum exercise regime for building muscle. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used methods…
Build Back Smaller? Extinction and Origination Patterns Change After Mass Extinctions
A sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years shows the usual rules of body size evolution change during mass extinctions…
A Concrete Solution: Recycled Concrete and CO2 From the Air Are Made Into a New Building Material
A new kind of concrete could reduce emissions from the construction industry. Calcium carbonate concrete is made from waste concrete and carbon dioxide from the…
Primordial “Hyper-Eye” Discovered: Astonishing 390 Million-Year-Old Hyper-Compound Eye With 200 Lenses
Trilobites of the suborder Phacopina had a unique eye in which about 200 large lenses in each eye spanned at least six individual facets, each…