SciencePhysics

Scientists Made a Weird System to Study the Mysteries of Photonic Crystals

When you see light, you’re looking at photons spat out by an excited atom. But what if instead of light, an excited atom released a wave of matter? That’s what a team of physicists has done—they created an experiment that spits out atoms through the same process by which atoms normally emit light, called “spontaneous … Continued

ScienceHealth

‘Horrific Accident’ Involving Dry Ice May Have Killed 77-Year-Old Woman

An ice cream delivery driver smashed the window of his car with a rock early Friday morning last week after seeing his wife and mother unconscious inside the vehicle. He found his spouse was in critical condition and his mother was dead. The Pierce County medical examiner’s office believe the 77-year-old women died by asphyxiation, … Continued

SciencePhysics

The Large Hadron Collider Accelerated ‘Atoms’ With Electrons for the First Time

You can feasibly put anything inside the world’s largest physics experiment, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, so long as it can be vaporized. You could even stick a sandwich in there. But for the first time, scientists have accelerated an atomic nucleus with electrons still attached. The Large Hadron Collider’s goal, in short, is … Continued

ScienceAnimals

How Does Your Self-Control Fare Against Great Tits’?

Great tits appear to have nearly as much self-control as chimpanzees, if a new experiment’s results are accurate. They might even have more self-control than the humans who still make jokes about the name “great tit.” Research continues to demonstrate that many birds are highly intelligent. Magpies can pass the mirror test, pigeons can navigate … Continued

ScienceAnimals

The World’s Largest King Penguin Colony Is Catastrophically Shrinking—and We Don’t Know Why

The last time scientists visited Ile aux Cochons in 1982, an island that is part of an archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean, the king penguin population was booming. Over 500,000 breeding pairs (around 2 million penguins total) huddled together there, making the island the largest king penguin colony in the world. But new research … Continued

ScienceHealth

Hong Kong Subway Study Shows How Quickly Bacteria Travel Across a City

If you’re one of the billions of people worldwide to use mass public transit regularly, you’re sharing a lot more than a commute with your fellow passengers, suggests a new study published Tuesday in Cell Reports. You’re also sharing and swapping the teeming microbes that call our bodies home. Researchers in Hong Kong—home to a … Continued

ScienceSpace

This Solar System Catalog Could Be Key to Finding an Earth-Like Exoplanet

By searching for the telltale, periodic dimming of light from distant stars, astronomers can spot orbiting exoplanets tens to hundreds of light-years away. But how do they know what these bodies look like? Perhaps they first try to imagine how the planets in our own Solar System might appear to a faraway alien world. A … Continued

ScienceAnimals

Incompetent Thieves Steal Shark From San Antonio Aquarium by Disguising It as a Baby

Security footage caught three people stealing a gray horn shark from the San Antonio Aquarium in Texas in a plot that would be comically stupid were it not likely to result in harm to the animal, with police taking into custody one person of interest and expecting to charge two others, according to the San … Continued

ScienceSpace

NASA’s TESS Spacecraft Has Begun Its Search for Faraway Planets

NASA’s newest exoplanet-hunting spacecraft has started taking scientific data as of last week, according to a NASA release. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is a two-year-long mission tasked with surveying the skies for planets around other stars. After launching this past April and delivering an incredible first image of the sky, the real hunt has … Continued

ScienceAnimals

Arctic Cruise Line Staff Reportedly Shoot and Kill Polar Bear After Attack on Guard

Guards for Arctic cruise line passengers shot and killed a polar bear on the island of Spitsbergen in the remote Svalbard region of Norway, resulting in condemnation on social media and swift apologies from the tour operator. Per the Guardian, the Joint Rescue Coordination for Northern Norway tweeted that tourists on board the MS Bremen … Continued

ScienceSpace

Supermassive Black Hole Stretches Starlight, Proving Einstein Right Again

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is magnificent. For a hundred years, it has consistently predicted all sorts of wacky phenomena scientists have later observed throughout space. One international team is now announcing that a 26-year-long observation campaign has once again confirmed the theory. Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) watched … Continued

ScienceAnimals

Russian Scientists Claim to Have Resurrected 40,000-Year-Old Worms Buried in Ice

A team of Russian scientists is lining themselves up to be the opening cast of a John Carpenter film. Earlier this month, in the journal Doklady Biological Sciences, they announced they had discovered ancient nematode worms that were able to resurrect themselves after spending at least 32,000 years buried in permafrost. The discovery, if legitimate, … Continued

ScienceSpace

Mars and Saturn Are Looking Really Good in These New Hubble Pics

Mars is in opposition tonight, meaning it’s about as close and as bright as it’s going to get. To celebrate, Hubble has released new images of the dusty red planet, as well as of Saturn, which was in opposition last month. Opposition means the Sun, Earth, and Mars are lined up (and the Earth is … Continued

ScienceSpace

Here’s a Live Feed of the Century’s Longest Lunar Eclipse

The longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century will start today at 3:30 p.m. and last until 5:15 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. PST). The moon won’t rise in North America until after the eclipse is over, so no one in North America will be able to see it, except for some folks … Continued

ScienceHealth

More Snack Foods Likely to be Recalled Due to Possible Salmonella Contamination, FDA Warns

Late last week, certain lots of popular snack foods such as Ritz Cracker Sandwiches and Pepperidge Farm’s Goldfish crackers were recalled over concerns they might contain disease-causing Salmonella bacteria. But the worst may yet be to come. On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration warned that more recalls of products traced to contaminated dry whey … Continued

ScienceSpace

Congressional Committee Grills NASA and Northrop Grumman on James Webb Space Telescope Delays

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has concluded two days of hearings focused on trying to understand how the James Webb Space Telescope—NASA’s flagship telescope project—could have gone from a 2007 planned launch with a $500 million budget to a 2021 launch with a $9.6 billion budget. The discussion was mostly subdued, with … Continued

ScienceHealth

Scientists Figured Out Why Our Mouths Heal So Freakishly Fast

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health think they’ve uncovered just why the mouth heals so easily. Their findings, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, might even help us discover how to make the rest of our body heal quicker, too. And all they had to do was (slightly) hurt some innocent people. Hoping to … Continued

ScienceSpace

Japanese Spacecraft Hayabusa2 Snaps Incredible Close-Up Image of Asteroid Ryugu

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 has made some of its closest approaches to asteroid Ryugu yet, returning breathtaking images. Here you can see the an image of the asteroid from just six kilometers (3.72 miles) away. One pixel in the image is around 60 centimeters (1.9 feet). Here’s the full image: Hayabusa2 will eventually try to … Continued

ScienceHealth

Why Your SPF 15 Sunscreen Probably Isn’t Enough to Protect You From the Sun

Are you always careful to apply sunscreen before a day outdoors, but find yourself getting burned anyway? It might be due to your application technique. Dermatologists say that most people don’t put on a thick enough layer sunscreen, and new research—in which scientists put varying amounts of sunscreen on volunteers’ butts—shows how those thin applications … Continued

ScienceHealth

A Parasitic Disease Spread by Sandflies Is More Common in the U.S. Than Previously Thought

A disease spread by sandflies seen as an exotic nuisance in the U.S. might not be solely a traveler’s disease after all. A new study published Wednesday in JAMA Dermatology suggests that most American cases of leishmaniasis are actually spread by native bugs, not caught while traveling. And thanks to climate change, the parasitic illness … Continued