Uncategorized
- Animals
Current coral bleaching event is the longest known
Heat stress has led to the longest coral bleaching event on record. Scientists now worry that global warming may make such prolonged crises more frequent.
- Health & Medicine
Scientists Say: Poisonous
A poison-arrow frog is poisonous, but a rattlesnake is not. What’s the difference? It’s how the poison is delivered.
- Brain
Hormone affects how teens’ brains control emotions
Using scans of brain activity, scientists show that surging hormones drive where emotions get processed in a teen’s brain.
- Planets
By Jove! Juno-cam sends back first postcard
After a long and quiet trek through space, the Juno spacecraft showed it weathered the trip fine and is ready to get on with its business: probing what makes Jupiter tick.
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Teacher invites Twitter into the classroom
Twitter can connect students with scientists in real time. But engaging tweens in an open social network also requires caution, one teacher warns.
- Earth
Helium discovery blows away shortage worries
Fears that the world may soon run out of helium have been set aside for now by the finding of a huge reservoir of the gas in East Africa.
- Health & Medicine
Strict gun laws ended mass shootings in Australia
Australia enacted tough gun laws in 1996, which cut gun exposure — especially to semiautomatic weapons. Since then, new data show, that nation has experienced zero mass shootings.
- Earth
Scientists Say: Plastisphere
As plastic floats in the ocean, it can acquire its own colony of microbes and algae. We call this ecosystem the plastisphere.
- Earth
Seafloor hosts surprising number of deep-sea vents
A new sensor detects changes in seawater chemistry and finds far more ecosystem-supporting seafloor vents than scientists had believed were out there.
- Brain
Gasp! At the movies, your breaths reveal your emotions
Researchers took air samples as they screened movies. What people exhaled were linked to film scenes’ emotional tone, they found.
- Planets
Success! The Juno spacecraft is now orbiting Jupiter
After nearly five years, the probe has safely reached its target. Juno will spend 20 months in orbit around the planet so that scientists can probe the many mysteries of this gas giant.
- Health & Medicine
Zika vaccines look promising
As a Zika epidemic surges through Brazil and northward, scientists are looking for drugs to keep more people from becoming infected. Several vaccines show promise in early tests — but none has yet been tried in people.
