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Surrounding our planet are rings of plasma, part of Earth’s magnetosphere, which are pulsing with radio waves. Those waves are not audible to the human ear alone, but radio antennae can pick them up, and that’s just what an instrument — the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) — on NASA’s…
Researchers on 70,000-mile voyage to investigate climate change say effect of humans is now ‘truly planetary’
Researcher Jonathan Haidt delves into the psychology of red-state, blue-state, and offers hope for reconciliation
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half its coral cover since 1985, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The loss has been spurred by a combination of factors including hurricanes, coral-eating starfish and coral bleaching. The paper is the most comprehensive survey of a…
Falsified data is the main reason biomedical and life science research articles are retracted, a problem that has increased 10-fold in the past three decades, a review of studies found. About 43% of the articles were rescinded because of made-up or manipulated data, 14% were retracted because the study appeared in more than one publication…
While rovers are ideal for exploring Mars, a boat is best for Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Scientists are proposing a new mission to explore this alluring world that would send a floating probe to land in a lake on Titan, the largest of the more than 60 natural satellites of Saturn. Smaller than Earth but…
Honey bee brains could soon be helping robots act more independently. The way that bees smell and see is being studied in a £1m project to produce a simulation of the insect’s sensory systems. The simulated bee brain will then be used by a flying robot to help it make decisions about how to navigate…
A peek at swirling matter around a giant black hole verifies that it is the source of a monstrous blast of energy thousands of light-years long, researchers say. Bursts of energy known as relativistic jets spew out matter at close to the speed of light. These jets can travel across an entire galaxy, suggesting they…
Washington State University researchers have found that the great-grandchildren of pregnant rats exposed to low doses of dioxin develop diseases and reproductive abnormalities — even though they did not have direct exposure. The finding challenges the traditional explanation of how traits are passed from one generation to another.
As the clock winds down to December 21, experts on the Mayan calendar have been racing to convince people that the Mayas didn’t predict an apocalypse for the end of this year. Some experts are now saying the Mayas may indeed have made prophecies, just not about the end of the world. Archaeologists, anthropologists and…