Three buildings, two librarians, and six hours into my first “real” Library of Congress visit, I’m no closer to getting the research done that I wanted to do. When you’re doing science writing it’s only common sense to look at the literature that’s out there. Most of the time I can access the academic journals [...]
For the first time, a death-diving comet has been observed as it vaporized in the sun’s atmosphere, thanks to new data from a NASA satellite. More than a thousand known comets are so-called Kreutz sungrazers, a family of icy bodies that pass very near to the sun’s surface on their orbits through the solar system. [...]
What’s a songbird doing in the belly of a tiger shark? The predators are eating land birds affected by offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (map), according to new research. Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, [...]
In a few years, you could be listening to an album of new songs featuring a duet between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. No, the two never cut a record together, but engineers and computer programmers are getting closer to being able to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs. Yamaha’s been developing voice [...]
The brain-filled bodies of some baby spiders—such as the young of the orb-weaver Leucauge mariana—bulge until the spiders grow to adult size.
Much attention has been given to the gap in performance between boys and girls in mathematics skills. In a new study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and Janet Mertz, a professor of oncology at the University [...]
Russia’s latest shot at Mars suffered a setback shortly after launch yesterday when its upper-stage thrusters failed to fire, leaving the Phobos-Grunt probe stuck in orbit around Earth instead of on its way into deep space. Details are still hazy about what went wrong, but the problem appears to lie with an instrument called a [...]
For many spiders, females of the species are much bigger than the males—N. pilipes females are up to ten times larger—so mating is always a risky proposition. An unlucky suitor might get interrupted in his carnal embrace when a female kicks him off and eats him.
Inspired by The Oatmeal’s fantastic take on high school classes I began thinking about what the most useful classes I took in high school were. Besides the hard science courses, which have turned out to be serendipitously useful (but I really can’t suggest everyone run out and take physics just because they might decide to [...]
The hundreds of distant worlds, some large and some small, that are known to dot the galaxy provide plenty of intrigue for the scientists who hunt them. But the catalogued planetary population has just gotten a lot larger and more diverse, thanks to word this week of a newly identified planet orbiting two suns, more [...]