In turquoise waters off the Indonesian coast, evolutionary geneticist Melissa Ilardo watched as the diver, wearing handmade, wooden goggles, spotted a giant clam meters below and darted down to retrieve it. The diver was one of the Bajau people of Southeast Asia, known for holding their breath for long periods while spearing fish and gathering […]
Pluto’s largest moon, long seen as a mysterious smudge at the outer reaches of our solar system, was revealed in 2015 closeup images to be pocked with craters, mountains and steep-sided depressions called chasmas. Now, 12 of those topographical features have names. Charon’s six most prominent craters were named for fictional explorers, including Dorothy who […]
In a transplant first, a U.S. veteran severely injured by an explosive device in Afghanistan has received a penis and scrotum from a deceased donor. During the 14-hour surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, doctors removed the patient’s damaged tissues and connected three arteries, four veins, two nerves and the urethra to the donated […]
Astronomers are going gaga over Gaia. The April 25 release of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which cataloged nearly 1.7 billion stars, has kicked off a scientific spree, with multiple papers published online in the last two weeks at arXiv.org. Charting stars in the Milky Way and beyond, Gaia surveys the entire […]
Protons are no one-trick ponies. Although famous for their positive electric charge, the particles also carry an analogous, lesser-known charge, called the weak charge. Now, physicists have made the most precise measurement of the proton’s underdog attribute, members of the Q-weak experiment report in the May 10 Nature. The weak charge dictates how the proton […]
Despite a public debate that grows more fractious with every school shooting — from Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., to Parkland, Fla., and the latest deadly attack May 18 in Santa Fe, Texas — Americans actually agree on gun policy to a surprising extent. According to a new survey of more than 2,100 people, […]
Emergency teams responding to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo began on May 21 inoculating those most at risk of contracting the virus: health workers and people who have come into contact with Ebola victims. It’s the first real-world test for an experimental vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV. In field trials in Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2015, […]
The first observed smashup of two stellar remnants known as neutron stars probably forged the least massive black hole yet discovered, researchers report in the June 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters. This cosmic collision, observed in August 2017, took the astronomical community by storm and offered insights into the origins of precious metals and the mysterious […]
Pip-squeak particles called neutrinos are dishing out more than scientists had bargained for. A particle detector has spotted a puzzling abundance of the lightweight subatomic particles and their antimatter partners, antineutrinos, physicists report May 30 at arXiv.org. The finding mirrors a neutrino excess found more than two decades ago. And that match has researchers wondering […]
How big is the sun? Well, that depends on when you’re measuring. The sun slightly shrinks and expands as it goes through a solar cycle, a roughly 11-year period of high and low magnetic activity, a new study finds. When the sun is the most active, its radius decreases by 1 or 2 kilometers, two […]