science-blogs

The Nikon Small World photomicrography competition was expanded to include video three years ago, and the result has been an incredible look into living things on the microscopic scale. This year's winning video is a three-dimensional look through a 10-day-old quail embryo growing inside its egg.

Scientists have devised a strategy they hope will one day make bionic ears even sharper. The idea is to make neurons inside the cochlea sprout new branches and become more sensitive to signals from a cochlear implant.

Though dinosaur-killing impacts are rare, large asteroids routinely hit the Earth. In the visualization above, you can see the location of 26 space rocks that slammed into our planet between 2000 and 2013, each releasing the energy of our most powerful nuclear weapons.

Over its lifetime, Earth has hosted countless species. But some of those species, like the dinosaurs, have managed to claw their way into a special place in our imaginations. Now, a new book illustrates the dinosaurs — and many of the beasts of millennia ago — in beautiful, spectacular and vicious style. In one illustration, […]

James Day Winemaking may conjure images of sun-­dappled vineyards and grand châteaus. But a typical ­bottle of Napa Cabernet owes more to lab-coat-­wearing chemists than to barefoot grape stompers. Like most foodstuffs, wine has been thoroughly industrialized. ­Million-­gallon batches are cooked up in ­behemoth factories in Australia or California’s less-dreamy-­sounding Central Valley and made of grapes […]

When an asteroid plows into the Earth, it destroys pretty much everything in its path. But new research has shown that glass created during a searing asteroid impact can actually trap microscopic signs of life for millions of years, providing scientists with a snapshot of the biology in the area just before and after the strike.

Let people who love sore backs and dirty fingernails painstakingly tend their gardenias. Today’s backyard should be a maximized, automated, hyperefficient system of caloric production. With a little science—and some engineering prowess—you can keep your plot tidy, pest-free, and healthy while barely lifting a finger. So kick back with a gin-spiked kombucha and let your self-maintaining yard crank out the zero-mile arugula.

Bryan Pijanowski wants to capture the sounds of the world on a single day, and he needs your help. Beginning on Earth Day of this year, Pijanowski hopes to enlist thousands of people in recording a few minutes of their everyday surroundings with his Soundscape Recorder smartphone app.

Animals sometimes sleep inside the hollows of giant 2,000-year old baobab trees inside Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa. Humans too, sometimes use the trees, for more dubious purposes -- a jail, a toilet, a pop-up bar -- as photographer Rachel Sussman discovered when she toured the park to photograph the trees for her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World.

With a range stretching from Argentina all the way up into the southern U.S., this incredible genus of ants has also mastered the art of rainforest skydiving, leaping from the canopy to avoid predators, only to steer themselves mid-flight right back onto the trunk of their home tree. And they do it with remarkable agility.

It's not often that we think about deep time. Lucky to live for a century, humans flitter like mayflies across Earth's surface, our own epoch an eyeblink in a planetary history that's largely hidden from everyday consciousness. Every now and then, though, that history punches right through into the present.

Astronomers are one step closer to discovering Earth Two. They have found an exoplanet slightly larger than our own, orbiting a star at a distance where it could have liquid water on its surface.

Writing today in Current Biology, researchers for the first time describe a critter that has traded sex organs. Females are equipped with a penis-like structure called a gynosome, which “deeply penetrates” the duct leading to the male’s sperm storage organ.

Kent Kiehl has been interviewing psychopaths for more than 20 years. More recently he's acquired a mobile MRI scanner and permission to scan the brains of New Mexico state prison inmates. He talked with WIRED about what's different in the brains of psychopaths and why he views psychopathy as a preventable mental disorder.

For all but the shyest of wallflowers, moving to music is a natural human response. But what is it about a catchy tune that makes us groove? Scientists think they've figured out at least part of the recipe: just the right mix of regular rhythms and unexpected beats.

There are a lot of online resources for information about space history, but none can rival the combination of thorough and adorable you’ll find at Historic Spacecraft. The site is full of information about recent and past launches, old space programs, and much more, but it owes its unique charm to the drawings of spacecraft that […]

Dr. Pierre Mégevand was in the middle of a somewhat-routine epilepsy test when his patient, a 22-year old man, said Mégevand and his medical team looked like they had transformed into Italians working at a pizzeria — aprons and all. It wasn’t long, the patient said, before the doctors morphed back into their exam room […]

In Western Tanzania tribes of wandering foragers called Hadza eat a diet of roots, berries, and game. According to a new study, their guts are home to a microbial community unlike anything that's been seen before in a modern human population -- providing, perhaps, a snapshot of what the human gut microbiome looked like before our ancestors figured out how to farm about 12,000 years ago.

Tonight the Earth, moon, and sun will align just right to put on a celestial show known as a total lunar eclipse. Though you can just look up in the sky to catch the event, we’ve also got some spectacular live feeds of the eclipse for those trapped inside by cold, cloud cover, or agoraphobia. […]

A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details the evolution of a flesh-eating bacteria, group A Streptococcus. By charting its evolution, scientists hope to gain invaluable insights into tackling subsequent generations of these menaces, and to begin to better understand the very nature of epidemics.

Attention weather superfans: El Niño might be coming back. And this time, we could be in for a big one.

Scientists say it was the speed with which the landslide flowed downhill into the town of Oso, Washington in March that made it so deadly. This animation shows the slide's terrifyingly fast spread.

Cuttlefish are far and away nature’s most adept camouflagers, capable of observing their surroundings and perfectly adjusting not only their color but also their skin texture in just 250 milliseconds. And it’s not just about blending in: They can also launch truly bizarre displays of rippling colors to either intimidate rivals or hypnotize prey. Oh, also. They’re color blind. Yeah … scientists aren’t quite sure how that’s possible quite yet.

You're looking at a neutrino named Big Bird. This particle, which has an energy 1,000 times that of the protons smashed together at the LHC, traveled across the universe before hitting an atom at the South Pole and being recorded at an enormous underground observatory named IceCube.

Researchers have recorded a remarkable flight behavior in the fruit fly species Drosophila hydei, they report today in Science. When threatened by a predator, the spry critters can change course in just one one-hundredth of a second, rolling on their sides and banking hard. Normally flapping their wings 200 times a second, the flies accomplish this in almost a single wing beat.

Harvestmen (also known as daddy long legs) aren’t spiders, and if you could (or wanted to) lean close enough, you’d be able to see one of the few physical features that distinguish them from their arachnid cousins. It’s in the eyes: Spiders usually have 6 or more, but the harvestman has only one set, tightly […]

Of all the birds on Earth, perhaps none is more unique than the South American oilbird, which 90 million years ago hopped onto its own branch of the evolutionary tree and has been on it ever since. The oilbird perches atop a new analysis of avian distinctiveness: how old each species is, and whether they have close relatives.

Over the past 50 years, the government space agency has built an awful lot of stuff for, well, space. But with its $17 billion annual budget, it has also done quite a bit of research and development in other areas, and even its space gear managed to influence so many other things down here on earth.

Ed Lu wants to nudge killer space rocks out of their near-earth trajectories.

These days we freak out whenever some dinky bollide explodes in the sky over Russia. But scientists have now reconstructed the effects of an enormous 3.26-billion-year-old asteroid impact on Earth that boiled the oceans, turned the sky red hot, and generated a half-hour-long earthquake that shook the planet.

Frequently cast as plant-gobbling, biodiversity-destroying villains, deer may actually play a vital role in making their forests more lush and vibrant.

The Morbid Anatomy Anthology is a compilation of essays on a weird range of topics, including hysteria, postmortem photography, books bound in human skin, and the Palermo catacombs.

Look to the east tonight after sunset and you’ll see a bright red speck of light that will rise to the top of the sky by midnight. That spot isn’t a star, but Mars, which is on its way to making its closest approach to our planet since 2007.

Cats and dogs occupy a unique place in the animal kingdom's vast menagerie. They've come out of the wild and into our living rooms, an extraordinary evolutionary and sociological journey that now raises profound questions about what it means to be a person.

As a boy growing up in India, Manu Prakash once undertook a DIY pyrotechnics experiment that didn’t quite go as planned. He managed to start a fire and burn his hand. “I had an extreme chemistry experience,” said Prakash, who’s now a bioengineer at Stanford. Prakash hopes to kindle some of the same curiosity about chemistry (minus the actual combustion) with a new hand-crank operated chemistry set for kids.

James Chang, a professor of surgery at Stanford specializing in hand surgery and reconstruction, discovered that the hands on some of Rodin’s sculptures look very similar to the deformed and injured hands he operates on.

Scientists have discovered a hole in the atmosphere that allows ozone-depleting compounds and other chemicals to bypass the atmosphere’s natural “washing machine” layer.

Throw out that lame old atomic clock that's only accurate to a few tens of quadrillionths of a second. The U.S. has introduced a new atomic clock that is three times more accurate than previous devices.

The moray eel has a second set of jaws that fire forward and pull prey down its gullet, just like in Alien … or so people who have seen the whole movie tell me.

During photosynthesis, the chlorophyll in healthy plants absorbs light to be converted into energy, but it also emits a little bit of fluorescence. Scientists have now figured out how to use that glow to measure the productivity of plants in a given region.