Some 330 million years ago, a galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood scored a bullseye, shooting right through the heart of large neighboring galaxy. The rare collision restructured the bigger galaxy, NGC 922, giving it the unusual, lopsided ring of hot pink clouds seen in images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Galaxies like NGC 922 are…
Mars has long held a fascination for those of us on Earth, but recent NASA pictures of Martian landscapes are giving us a much better understanding of the red planet. Meanwhile, scientists across the globe are working on robots and space suits with the hope that humans may soon explore Mars in person. Check out…
For three weeks spread out over April and October of this year, the Suomi NPP satellite (jointly of NASA and NOAA) scanned all the Earth’s land as it appeared at night. Scientists then mapped the satellite’s data — 2.5 terabytes of it — over an earlier Blue Marble image, transforming that picture’s daytime blues, browns,…
Within the next five years, it may be possible to charge a cellphone without knowing where it is and destroy tumors no matter how deep they are within the body, using research conducted at the University of Maryland. Through an age-old technique called time reversal, a team of professors discovered how to communicate — by…
Across the world, many women drop out of — or never enter — work in the ‘knowledge society’, even after studying science and technology. Low enrollment rates for women in all but the life sciences, and high dropout rates after university (almost a third of women in science), result in not only the loss of…
Rich countries are to blame for climate change and should take the lead in forging a global climate pact by 2015, a deadline that “must be met,” the head of the United Nations said. On the sidelines of international climate talks in Qatar, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it was “only fair and reasonable that…
The towering redwood forests along California’s coast are known for the clammy fog that rolls in from the ocean almost every night. Now scientists have discovered an unwelcome stowaway in these cloud banks: mercury. Previous research had shown that fog sampled in and around Santa Cruz, California, contained the heavy metal mercury but no one…
Extroverted gorillas in captivity outlive their shy brethren, a new study of these great apes in North American zoos and sanctuaries finds. Using methods adapted from studying human personality, keepers, volunteers, researchers and other caretakers gauged 298 individual gorillas’ temperaments. These gorillas were followed over 18 years and their life spans recorded. The results revealed…
Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint, experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill us. But new research suggests that disgust not…
If humanity’s earthly tenure isn’t fated to end with the Mayan calendar, it is certain to end someday. It’s the sort of thing artist and author, Trevor Paglen, thinks about a lot. He knows, for example, that we homo sapiens have occupied the earth a mere .004 percent of its 4.5 billion-year history. He knows…