A tally of the Red Planet's greenhouse gases finds some troubling news for anyone hoping for breathable air and swimmable water on Mars. | Continue reading
Iran's Gorgan Wall is surpassed only by the Great Wall of China — and it's made of mud. | Continue reading
From Japanese artist Hajime Narukawa, the AuthaGraph map breaks the globe into sections to allow it to be folded flat while maintaining accurate dimensions. | Continue reading
Iran's Gorgan Wall is surpassed only by the Great Wall of China — and it's made of mud. | Continue reading
America's space agency wants to spread WiFi across the solar system. | Continue reading
Two years ago, a paper by Swedish neuroscientist Anders Eklund and colleagues caused a media storm. The paper, Cluster Failure, reported that the most widely used methods for the analysis of fMRI data are flawed and produce a high rate of false positives. As I said at the time, C … | Continue reading
Baikonur is an oppressive place, unforgiving, friendly only to camels and hardy plants. Yet the rockets keep launching here on time. | Continue reading
A newborn snake, preserved in amber from Myanmar for nearly 100 million years, is a first for the fossil record and reveals how the animals developed. | Continue reading
These places from your space colonization dreams might end up actual nightmares. | Continue reading
When a supermassive black hole spews jets of material in Earth's direction - like staring down the barrel of a gun - astronomers call it a blazar. | Continue reading
Coconut crabs start out white and turn red or blue as they age. But why there are two colors and how they persist is a mystery that has scientists stumped. | Continue reading
Astronomers confirm the theory with some of the heaviest object around — three stars. | Continue reading
It took until this year for researchers to pin down exactly why dripping faucets make that annoying sound. | Continue reading
The idea of infinity underlies all of modern physics, but it makes equations meaningless and isn't necessary for physics to work. | Continue reading
In research on people, scientists are typically interested in the group data – the mean, median, and variance of a sample of people. But according to a provocative new paper out in PNAS, the statistics of a group can obscure the variability within individuals, over time. The pape … | Continue reading
Only a few miles separate the craft from its target, which could hold clues to the formation of our solar system. | Continue reading
The eruption that started in Leilani Estates on the lower East Rift Zone of Kīlauea is rapidly approaching the end of its second month, and right now, there are no signs the eruption will be ending soon. For many of us, this eruption seems unprecedented: How often do volcanoes er … | Continue reading
Forecasters now peg the odds El Niño's emergence during fall and continuation into the winter of 2019 at 65 percent | Continue reading
It's only sliiiightly creepy. | Continue reading
Scientists have observed a black hole eating a star before, but this was the first time time anyone managed to get such detailed images of the jets. | Continue reading
Researchers surveyed stars, finding that the Milky Way is twice as large as previously thought. | Continue reading
As companies race to make lightning-fast shipping the norm, they need to consider the environmental impacts of new methods including drone delivery. | Continue reading
Bear witness to the changing face of our planet using an easy-to-use tool for accessing a trove of satellite data | Continue reading
Some languages don't use gendered pronouns, some assign genders to everything. | Continue reading
Although the Sun is in a singularly serene state right now, that doesn't mean it's asleep. | Continue reading
In late 2016, staff at the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, began to report hearing unusual sounds. Over the coming months, some staff were struck down by hearing loss and concussion-like symptoms. The strange sounds were interpreted as the cause, perhaps even reflecting a sonic weapo … | Continue reading
A bright tangle of magnetic field lines has appeared on its surface. But otherwise the Sun is singularly serene. What's going on? | Continue reading
New finds in the Philippines suggest at least one hominin species was present there more than ten times earlier than previously known. | Continue reading
A new paper from MIT neuroscientists Sharon Gilad-Gutnick and colleagues reveals that we are remarkably good at recognizing faces even if they are highly distorted. Not only is this scientifically interesting, the deformed images used in this study are rather hilarious. Here’s an … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking lately about the question of what leads scientists to choose a discipline. Why does someone end up as a chemist rather than a biologist? A geneticist as opposed to a cognitive neuroscientist? We might hope that people choose their discipline based on an underst … | Continue reading