The Heat Goes On: Last Month Was the Second Warmest October on Record

As rising floodwaters assault Venice, there's now an 85% chance that 2019 will come in as second warmest year This anomaly map shows how temperatures departed last month from the long-term average. (Note: The temperature scale is in Celsius. Source: NASA GISS) Two U.S. agencies have now released their global warming report cards for last month, and they both show the same depressing grade: Of the 139 Octobers since 1880, last month was the second warmest on record. A third analysis,

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Astronomers Catch Water Erupting from Plumes on Jupiter's Icy Moon Europa

Subsurface water on Jupiter's moon Europa is one place where humans plan to search for life. This artist's concept shows a massive plume of underground water erupting from the moon's surface. (Credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI) Jupiter’s moon Europa has an icy shell that conceals a liquid water ocean. Now, scientists have made the first direct measurement of water vapor in Europa’s atmosphere. It's the best evidence yet for a water plume erupting from the moon’s surface. The measuremen

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New Study Estimates How Many Children in Europe Were Born From Adultery

(Credit: Tomsickova Tatyana/Shutterstock) A new study takes a look at the rates of extramarital childbirth in Europe over the past 500 years. This includes children born as the result of adultery — and, spoiler, it's much lower than you probably think. The study, published in Current Biology, used genetic and historical data to estimate how often parents had children outside their primary relationship over the past 500 years in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The researchers

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As a Vast Swath of Australia Burns, the View From Space is Truly Frightening

Thick palls of smoke stream from Australia's sprawling bushfires in this view acquired by NASA's Aqua satellite on Nov. 11, 2019. The image consists of a natural-color view with an infrared overlay revealing areas of burning. (Source: NASA Worldview image processed by Pierre Markuse) So far, Australia's bushfires have scorched more than 4,000 square miles — an area greater than ten times the size of New York City. With hot and dry conditions predicted for weeks to come, there's not much

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Is the Human Olfactory Bulb Necessary?

Many people may be living life without a particular brain region - and not suffering any ill-effects. In a new paper in Neuron, neuroscientists Tali Weiss and colleagues discuss five women who appear to completely lack olfactory bulbs (OB). According to most neuroscience textbooks, no OB should mean no sense of smell, because the OB is believed to be a key relay point for olfactory signals. As Wikipedia puts it: The olfactory bulb transmits smell information from the nose to the b

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Black Holes Orbiting Even Bigger Black Holes Might Also Be Eating Each Other

A simulation of an accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole. (Credit: Scott C. Noble) When the LIGO collaboration first detected the spacetime ripples of a gravitational wave it came from the merger of two black holes. To date, scientists have detected at least ten pairs of black holes spiraling into and combining with each other. But there's still an outstanding mystery about these singularities: why are some of them so big? Some have been far larger than scientists think po

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NASA Instrument Spots Its Brightest X-Ray Burst Ever

An illustration depicting a Type I X-ray burst. A similar supernova generated the extreme X-ray burst that NASA's NICER instrument recently recorded. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)) In late August, an instrument on the International Space Station, called NICER, spotted its brightest burst of X-ray radiation yet. NICER, or the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, studies X-rays that come from neutron stars, the super-dense remnants of some stars afte

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A New, Prehistoric Bird Sheds Light on How They Took to the Skies

An artist's reconstruction of what Fukuipteryx prima may have looked like. (Credit: Masanori Yoshida) It was a typical Japanese summer — hot, humid and cloudy — when archaeologists pulled a well-preserved, fossilized bird from the ground in 2013. Their find, announced this week in Nature Communications Biology, might change our idea of what adaptations were essential to the development of flight. Close to Flight Named Fukuipteryx prima, the archaeologists date the bird to the Earl

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Zoonoses: The Diseases Our Cats and Dogs Give Us

(Credit: Gladskikh Tatiana/Shutterstock) Some of the biggest public health crises of the last few years can be traced back to animals. HIV got its start as a virus in monkeys, and Ebola probably jumped to humans from other primates or fruit bats. And there’s no points for guessing the animals we got bird flu and swine flu from. But animal-borne diseases can start a lot closer to home. In fact, there are a number we can pick up from our dogs and cats. Our Pets, Their Diseases Most d

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With a Floating Bead, This Device Makes Truly 3D Holographs

A floating butterfly created by the Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display. (Credit: Eimontas Jankauskis) With the help of sound waves and a small plastic ball, researchers in the U.K. have designed a machine that generates truly 3D holographs. The whole system is slightly smaller than a shoebox and makes simple images, like a butterfly or smiley face, that are less than an inch tall. Described in Nature, the device is one of the first 3D image generators that also responds to touch and produce

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Ancient Egyptians Didn't Farm Ibises, They Just Mummified Them

Scene from the Books of the Dead (The Egyptian museum) showing the ibis-headed God Thoth recording the result of the final judgement. (Credit: Wasef et al, 2019) Ancient Egyptian catacombs stretch for kilometers underground. Branching off the tunnels are rooms, and those rooms are stacked to the ceilings with jars holding more than one million mummified African sacred ibises.  Egyptians buried millions of these leggy, long-beaked birds as prayer offerings to Thoth, the god of wisdom and w

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Ancient Proteins Tell Story Of Gigantopithecus, Largest-Ever Primate

Artist's rendering of how large Gigantopithecus blacki may have been. In life, G. blacki would have spent most of its time on all fours. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) There's nothing small about Gigantopithecus blacki. The massive extinct animal likely rivaled a modern polar bear in size, weighing more than 1,000 pounds and standing nearly ten feet tall on its back legs. The mystery around G. blacki is also super-sized. This largest of primates is known only from plentiful teeth and a fe

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This Spacecraft Will Detect if Exoplanet Skies are Cloudy, Hazy or Clear

NASA is adding an instrument to the European Space Agency's ARIEL spacecraft.(Credit: ESA/STFC RAL Space/UCL/Europlanet-Science Office) NASA announced last week that it will contribute to a European Space Agency mission scheduled to launch in 2028. The spacecraft, called ARIEL (for Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey), will be the first space mission dedicated to studying exoplanet atmospheres.  During its primary mission lasting some four years, ARIEL will study th

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SpaceX Launches 60 more Starlink Satellites to Orbit

The Falcon 9 rocket taking off for the Starlink mission on November 11. (Credit: SpaceX/Flickr) On November 11, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying another 60 Starlink satellites, which will eventually provide internet service worldwide. The launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station made history by reusing a record number of rocket parts. But even with that feat in aerospace design, the launch wasn’t celebrated by everyone. According to SpaceX’s plans, Starlink will be a co

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How Could We Find a Wormhole Hiding in the Milky Way?

A new study outlined a possible method to search for a wormhole at the center of the Milky Way, where a supermassive black hole, like the one seen in this artist's concept, resides. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) If there was a wormhole in the center of our galaxy, how could we tell? Two physicists propose that carefully watching the motions of a star orbiting the Milky Way's supermassive black hole might help scientists start to check. The researchers published the idea in a recent paper in the

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Why People In Ancient Times Didn't Get the Plague

What happened to make plague able to cause devastating epidemics, as in this depiction from 1349? (Credit: Pierart dou Tielt/Wikimedia) One of civilization’s most prolific killers shadowed humans for thousands of years without their knowledge. The bacteria Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague, is thought to be responsible for up to 200 million deaths across human history — more than twice the casualties of World War II. The Y. pestis death toll comes from three widespread dise

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How the Nile River Has Stayed In One Place for 30 Million Years

The Nile River seen at sunrise. (Credit: Kirsty Bisset/Shutterstock) Thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians built their agricultural systems around the dependable movement of the Nile. Those rhythms date back much further than any human relative has been alive, scientists now find. New research shows that the Nile has kept about the same course for its entire 30 million year existence. This is likely thanks to a reliable flow of rocky material just below the Earth's surface, which cont

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Brain Scanning vs. Self-Rated Brain Activity

On Twitter this week I joked that neuroscientists could save money on brain scanners by just asking people how active their brains are. Why do we spend so much on neuroimaging and then rely on self-report measures of the other variables of interest? Why not self-report brain activity, how active is your amygdala 1-10? https://t.co/ph3A2Uc6zc— Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) November 6, 2019 However, it turns out that there has already been a study that actually asked people to do this,

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What It Takes to be a Space Pilot

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. The craft is flown by human pilots to space. (Credit: Steve Mann/Shutterstock) Taking control of a 3,000-pound rocket motor launching into an inhospitable environment at speeds exceeding 2,000 mph sounds terrifying to some. But others will spend their whole careers in pursuit of those ephemeral, weightless moments. With the expansion of commercial space exploration, more pilots will be needed to guide spacecraft beyond the bounds of Earth. These pilots com

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Running for Less Than an Hour a Week Could Help You Live Longer

Running just once a week could lead to a longer life, a new study finds. (Credit: Halfpoint/Shutterstock) Reluctant joggers, here’s some encouragement: Running even once a week has some benefits. According to a new study, running 50 minutes a week, at a pace between a 10- and 7.5-minute mile, helped reduce the risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease and other causes. Working out more than that didn’t convey significantly more health benefits, say the researchers, based on a revi

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