May 24th, 2022 - What is time? Why is it so different from space? And where did it come from? Scientists are still stumped by these questions — but working harder than ever to answer them. St. Augustine said of time, "If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I don't know." Time is an elusive concept: We all experience it, and yet, the challenge of defining it has tested philosophers and scientists for millennia.  It wasn't until Albert Einstein that we developed a more sophisticated mathematical understanding of time and space that allowed physicists to probe ... [Read More]

May 24th, 2022 - Axolotls are cute, charismatic salamanders that have an almost otherworldly ability to regenerate their body parts. But pollution and urbanization critically threaten this species' survival. When the Aztecs settled the Valley of Mexico around what is now Mexico City in the 13th century, they found a large salamander living in the lake surrounding the island where they built their capital, Tenochtitlán. They called the salamander "axolotl" after Xolotl, their god of fire and lightning. Xolotl was said to have transformed into a salamander , among other forms, to avoid being sacrificed ... [Read More]

May 24th, 2022 - The Xerces Society and Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent today to sue the U.S. Department of Agriculture's secretive Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for failing to properly consider harms to endangered species caused by insecticide spraying across millions of acres of western grasslands. APHIS oversees and funds the application of insecticides on rangelands in 17 states to prevent native grasshoppers from competing with livestock for forage. The main insecticide sprayed is diflubenzuron, which kills insects in their immature stages. It is typically sprayed ... [Read More]

May 24th, 2022 - We humans like to think our mastery of language sets us apart from the communication abilities of other animals, but an eye-opening new analysis of chimpanzees might force a rethink on just how unique our powers of speech really are.   In a new study , researchers analyzed almost 5,000 recordings of wild adult chimpanzee calls in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire (aka Ivory Coast). When they examined the structure of the calls captured on the recordings, they were surprised to find 390 unique vocal sequences – much like different kinds of sentences, assembled from ... [Read More]

May 24th, 2022 - Many families of land animals live separated by hundreds of kilometers of wide and vast oceans. Explanations for how they got so far from each other are as varied as the animals themselves.   In recent times, many animals have hitched rides with humans traveling around the world, on our vehicles, food products, and on our bodies. Before this, as far back as hundreds of millions of years ago, the continents were connected, and animals could just walk across the land. But in-between then and now, there seems to have been a lot of floating and hoping for the best. A new study has ... [Read More]

May 24th, 2022 - Nobel laureate Otto Hahn is . Fission is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, yet Hahn considered something else to be his best scientific work . In 1921, he was studying radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, Germany, when he noticed something he could not explain. One of the elements he was working with wasn't behaving as it should have . Hahn had unknowingly discovered the first nuclear isomer, an atomic nucleus whose protons and neutrons are arranged differently from the common form of the element, causing it to have unusual ... [Read More]

May 24th, 2022 - Bacteria are resourceful little organisms. They can live in some of the weirdest, most inhospitable places on our planet – arid deserts , toxic acidic lakes , even deep in Earth's crust below the ocean floor .   But scientists have just discovered a new, very unexpected habitat for the hardy little microbes: the venom of snakes and spiders. This contradicts what we thought we knew; such venoms contain antimicrobial compounds, which scientists assumed to mean they were sterile environments in which no microbes could thrive. The discovery to the contrary means bacteria that cause ... [Read More]

May 23rd, 2022 - Scientists are baffled at the odd telemetry data being relayed by Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 A NASA image of one of the Voyager space probes. Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space. On Sept. 5, 1977, NASA launched a space probe named Voyager 1 into the cosmos. Nearly 45 years later, much to the delighted astonishment of astronomers throughout the world, it is still humming along as it travels far past Pluto . In fact, Voyager 1 has traveled so far that it has left the bounds of our ... [Read More]