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Take a deep breath; Dec 21, 2012 is behind us. The Mayan calendar end-of-world debacle is over: zip, zilch, gone! The silliness, anxiety, and paranoia leading up to the predicted end of times was so bad that on Dec. 21st — the appointed doomsday — a worried citizen left a message on my office phone…
Does E always equal mc²? University of Arizona physicist Andrei Lebed suspects not – and plans to try and check. Einstein’s famous equation describes the fact that energy and mass are essentially the same thing and can be converted into one other. It’s since been validated in countless experiments and calculations – indeed, many technologies…
Two years of painstaking observation on the social interactions of a troop of free-ranging monkeys and an analysis of their family trees has found signs of natural selection affecting the behavior of the descendants. Rhesus macaques who had large, strong networks tended to be descendants of similarly social macaques, according to a Duke University team…
Neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani recorded dream appearances of 20 key objects, such as “male” or “room,” and used a machine-learning algorithm to correlate those concepts with fMRI images to find patterns that could be used to predict what people were dreaming about without having to wake them. Such information could help inform the study of why…
The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. How hot was it? The temperature differences between…
Astronomers have spotted a new component of the Milky Way galaxy’s skeleton — a “bone” of dust and gas that contains about as much material as 100,000 suns. The newfound Milky Way bone is more than 300 light-years long but just 1 or 2 light-years wide, giving it the appearance of a slender cosmic snake,…
While innocently surveying the Cosmos, astronomers serendipitously stumbled across a particularly uncouth galaxy. NGC 660 unleashed an epic belch, an event that we could see 44 million light-years distant. This event emanated from the galaxy’s core, around the likely location of a supermassive black hole. Why did the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s core…
The unbalanced orbit of a so-called “zombie planet” in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet’s behavior. New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross…
In the world of coral reefs, most of the news is pretty gloomy. Rising ocean temperatures have led to massive die-offs from Indonesia to Florida; emissions-driven acidity could dissolve corals’ structure-building ability in 20 years; rising sea levels threaten to block sunlight even from healthy reefs; and in November NOAA called on Congress to afford…
Blind mice can see again, after Oxford University researchers transplanted developing cells into their eyes and found they could re-form the entire light-sensitive layer of the retina. Videos show the nocturnal mice, which once didn’t notice the difference between light and dark at all, now run from the light and prefer to be in the…