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science

SPACE: Extraterrestrial Life Could Be Purple

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purple planet - pixabay

Alien life might be purple. That’s the conclusion of a new research paper that suggests that the first life on Earth might have had a lavender hue. In the International Journal of Astrobiology, microbiologist Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and postdoctoral researcher Edward Schwieterman at the University of California, Riverside, argue that before green plants started harnessing the power of the sun for energy, tiny purple organisms figured out a way to do the same. Alien life could be thriving in the same way, DasSarma said. “Astronomers have discovered thousands of new extrasolar planets recently … Read more

SCIENCE: The Real, Freaky Experiments That Inspired “Frankenstein”

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Frankenstein experiments

On Jan. 17 1803, a young man named George Forster was hanged for murder at Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection though. Forster was going to be electrified. The experiments were to be carried out by the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who discovered “animal electricity” in 1780, and for whom the field of galvanism is named. With Forster on the … Read more

SCIENCE: You Can Remember Up to 10,000 Faces

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faces - pixabay

How many faces do you retain in your memory? If you add up your immediate and extended family, schoolmates, friends, co-workers, and celebrities that you know through movies, television and the internet, you might easily be able to list a few hundred faces that you’d recognize on sight. But the real number of faces stored in your brain may be much higher than that. For the first time, researchers have pinned down the number of faces that people remember; the findings come from a small study of 25 people ages 18 to 61 years old. The answer: 5,000 on average … Read more

SCIENCE: Climate Change May Ruin Beer

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beer - pixabay

If the results of last week’s chilling U.N. climate report drove you to drink this weekend, first of all — we’re sorry. We don’t like it, either. Here’s a photo of a majestic elk sneezing to make you feel better. Secondly, we hate to say it, but we’ve got even more bad news for anyone hoping to drown their sorrows during that apocalyptic future. According to a new study in the journal Nature Plants, it looks like rising global temperatures are going to ruin beer for us too — and your next pity pint could soon cost you more than … Read more

Puppy-Size Roaches (and Other Bizarre Creatures) From “Beyond the Sixth Extinction”

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Beyond the Sixth Extinction

In a toxic urban landscape of the future, what strange (and still oddly familiar) animals might have evolved to survive there? A new book, “Beyond the Sixth Extinction: A Post-Apocalyptic Pop-Up” (Candlewick Press) by Shawn Sheehy, artfully imagines the grotesque creatures that could live in a possible future — one reshaped by disasters so destructive that 75 to 80 percent of life on Earth went extinct. How odd would this world’s inhabitants be? Imagine a giant, flightless pigeon that carries its young in pouches under its wings, a freshwater turtle with a shell fortified by heavy metals, and a cockroach … Read more

SPACE: Making Nuclear Pasta – Live Science

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Nuclear Pasta

How to cook “nuclear pasta” in three easy steps: 1. Boil one large, dying star until it goes supernova and explodes. (This could take a billion years, so be patient.) 2. Vigorously stir any leftover protons and electrons inside the star’s shriveled core until they merge into a soup of ultradense neutrons. Apply as much gravity as necessary. 3. Scrunch the neutron stew into an airtight sphere the size of Toronto. Cover in a crystalline crust and serve at 1.08 million degrees Fahrenheit (600,000 degrees Celsius). Voila! You have just made one of the universe’s strangest concoctions — nuclear pasta. … Read more

SCIENCE: The Human Eye Can See ‘Ghost Images’

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eye - pixabay

Scientists have discovered that the human eye has a spooky ability. It can detect “ghost images.” These are images that are encoded in random patterns, previously thought only detectable by computer. But in a new paper posted online on the preprint server arXiv, scientists in Scotland at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow have found that the human eye itself can do the required computations. “Although the brain can’t individually see them, the eye is somehow detecting all of the patterns, and then keeping the information there and summing everything together,” said study co-author Daniele Faccio, a … Read more

SPACE: Scientists Search for Our Mother Sun

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mother sun

Image Credit: NAOJ Billions of years ago, a huge star blasted open and spewed its guts into space. At that energetic moment, the so-called core-collapse supernova formed a debris cloud of brand-new atoms, forged in the heat of its blast. Time passed. The cloud contracted, attracted to itself by its own gravity. A star formed — our sun — surrounded by chunks of rock and gas that formed our planets and other orbiting bodies. Much later, we came along. That’s the basic story of our solar system’s birth. And, mostly from watching other supernovas and other star births out in … Read more

SCIENCE: Can We Revive an Ice-Age Horse?

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ice age horse

A team of scientists in Siberia is hopeful that a mummified 40,000-year-old baby horse can provide critical genetic material for cloning the extinct ice-age species. But experts told Live Science that they are skeptical that the scientists will be able to find viable DNA on the body at all, let alone overcome the enormous challenges of cloning a species that’s been extinct for millennia. Revived after millennia? The preserved foal’s body was discovered in August and was excavated from melting permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, a region in eastern Russia. Researchers working with the frozen remains recently told … Read more

SCIENCE: Hunting the “Dark Photon”

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dark photon - pixabay

Almost everything is missing. And a team of physicists is trying to find all of it. The universe as we know it includes about a tenth of the total stuff that’s out there. The rest? Missing. Invisible. Undetectable, except through the effects of its gravity on the fraction of stuff that we can see. Researchers call that missing stuff the dark sector — the class of energetic and massive particles that seemingly must exist out there somewhere but that don’t interact with luminous matter (the stuff we’re made of, along with everything we can see) in any way we can … Read more