Avalanches of ash, gas and rock can cascade downhill during volcanic eruptions. Known as pyroclastic flows, they may be even more dangerous than scientists had suspected. Those pulses are the result of turbulence, lab and field measurements now show. Within these slides, pulses of high pressure form. Those pressures can be far...
The millipedes we’ve known have been a lie. The Latin name for these arthropods implies an impressive set of 1,000 feet. Yet no millipede had ever been found with more than 750. Until now. This first millipede to live up to its name tunnels through deep soil using 1,306 little legs. In...
Brains are like sponges, slurping up new information. But sponges may also be a little bit like brains. Sponges, which are humans’ very distant evolutionary relatives, don’t have nervous systems. But a detailed analysis of sponge cells turns up what might just be an echo of our own brains: cells called...
The cosmos keeps outdoing itself. Extremely energetic light from space is an unexplained wonder. Scientists don’t know where that light comes from, exactly. And now astronomers have spotted this light, called gamma rays, at higher energies than ever before. You can’t see gamma rays with your eyes. They are much...
Earth’s geographic poles aren’t fixed. Instead, they wander in seasonal and near-annual cycles. The weather and ocean currents drive most of this slow drift. But a sudden zag in the direction of that drift started in the 1990s. That sharp change in direction appears due in large part to the melting...
Physicists have measured the shortest span of time ever. It’s 0.000000000000000000247 second, also known as 247 zeptoseconds. And this period is how it takes a single particle of light to pass through a molecule of hydrogen. Not familiar with zeptoseconds? Take all the seconds that have passed since the beginning...
Past observations had suggested there’s water on the moon. New telescope observations now find those findings hold water. Spacecraft had seen evidence of water ice in permanently shadowed craters. This was at the moon’s poles. There also had been hints of water molecules on the sunlit surface. But water sightings...
Most foods we eat are an explosion of flavor. But the tongue itself only detects a few major tastes — sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami (that’s savory). Notice anything missing? Where is the taste for fat? It’s much of what makes butter and cream so delicious. A new study now confirms...
Predators that tread on a colony of parchment tube worms may find themselves slimed. The worms get their name from the papery tubes in which they live. When threatened, these ocean creatures ooze a sticky mucus that can glow blue for days. Such light produced by animals, bacteria or algae...
Winds are picking up worldwide, and that is making the surface waters of the oceans swirl a bit faster, researchers report. A new analysis of the ocean’s kinetic energy, measured by thousands of floats around the world, suggests that surface ocean circulation has been accelerating since the early 1990s. Some...
Weighing a whale is a beast of a challenge. Scientists who study these majestic mammals can’t just hoist them out of the water and plop them onto some scale. But researchers now have a method to estimate a whale’s weight without disturbing it. The approach uses drone imagery of the animals at...
During sleep, waves of fresh fluid wash over the brain every 20 seconds, a new study finds. These slow, rhythmic blasts may help explain why sleep is so important for brain health. Studies in mice have shown that the waves can wash away proteins that build up between brain cells....
A new device works like a solar panel, except it doesn’t harvest energy from the sun. It captures energy from the cold night sky. A prototype of the device produced enough electricity at night to power a small light bulb. A bigger version might one day light rooms or charge phones. It...
Telescopes keep getting bigger — and more expensive. But what if there were a better way? One astronomer has suggested a possible work-around: Turn the entire Earth into a telescope lens by using the planet’s atmosphere to bend and focus light. When light from stars hits Earth’s atmosphere, the light bends, or...
Physicists are crushing it — hydrogen, that is. Squeezing the chemical element to extremely high pressure transforms it into a metal, a trio of researchers claims. The purported metallic hydrogen appeared at a pressure more than 4 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere, the scientists report June 13 at arXiv.org. If confirmed,...
In a massive survey of rivers across 72 countries, researchers found antibiotics at 66 percent of 711 sites sampled. Many of the most drug-polluted waterways were in Asia and Africa, where there hadn’t been much data until now. Environmental pollution from antibiotics is one driver of microbial drug resistance, which...
The mysterious cube arrived in the summer of 2013. Physicist Timothy Koeth had agreed to go to a parking lot for an unspecified delivery. Inside a blue cloth sack, swathed in paper towels, he found a small chunk of uranium. It was about 5 centimeters across, with “a white piece...
This is what a black hole looks like. A world-spanning network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope zoomed in on the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 to create this first-ever picture of a black hole. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture...
Mosquitoes can hear over distances much greater than anyone suspected, according to researchers at Cornell and Binghamton University. Their findings were published in the journal Current Biology. Until now, scientists believed that organisms required eardrums for long-range hearing, and that the feathery antennae with fine hairs that mosquitoes and some insects...
The human gut is lined with more than 100 million nerve cells—it’s practically a brain unto itself. And indeed, the gut actually talks to the brain, releasing hormones into the bloodstream that, over the course of about 10 minutes, tell us how hungry it is, or that we shouldn’t have...
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