Popular Science

NASA spent $420 million to send the Phoenix Lander to Mars last year. Festooned with state-of-the-art detection equipment, the rover's task was to scour the red surface in search of elusive Martian ice. And today, the NASA mission finally did uncover some extraterrestrial frost, and it did it with its simplest tool, a shovel.

To grasp the power of Toshiba’s new Aquilion ONE computed-tomography (CT) scanner, imagine facing a picturesque beach. Your camera doesn’t have a panoramic function, so you take snapshots pointing to the left, the center, and the right. You tape the photographs together and it looks gorgeous, sure, but you’re missing the action of the waves crashing on the sand.

Let's hope the Glyptapanteles wasp continues to find caterpillars tastier than humans — otherwise mankind might be in some trouble. As if laying 80 eggs inside of a caterpillar's body weren't bad enough, a new study published by the Public Library of Science details how the wasp larvae then take over the mind of the caterpillar, turning it into a zombie-like bodyguard.

Chimpanzees and humans share many similarities, which isn't surprising considering they're our closest living relatives. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week has added another to the list: third-party consolation. Researchers in England have discovered that chimps will calm each other down after conflicts and that the kissing and embracing help to alleviate the stress caused by the situation. Previous studies had focused on reconciliation between parties in conflict; this new work focuses on bystanders who come in afterward to offer solace.

The human brain is still largely an unsolved mystery. We only marginally understand how it works and are even less able to predict how it will behave in certain situations. One of the most frustrating of those situations is the coma. Anecdotes abound of people in comas who unexpectedly wake from them, much to their doctors' surprise. But what if doctors could get ahead of that surprise with a predictor of whether or not a patient will regain consciousness? A team of Belgian scientists have proposed just such a clue.