Your Netflix binging might be hurting the planet
If you spend a lot of your time online, it’s easy to be smug about your environmental impact.After all, you rarely print stuff out, so you don’t kill trees. You read The New York Times on your phone,...
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A bright idea could help eliminate a fishing problem
Bycatch is a problem. It's when fishing trawlers scoop up sea-life other than the species they're targeting.If there’s too much bycatch, the fishermen sometimes have to dump their entire catch back...
View ArticleThe octopus church of French Polynesia may have you rethink your next seafood...
Summer means salad. And in seafood-rich places, that might mean insalata di frutti di mare, or octopus salad. It consists of grilled octopus — tentacles and body — a little lettuce, some white beans...
View ArticleNoisy waters are bad news for the orcas of the Pacific Northwest
Orcas in the Pacific Northwest are stressed.The area is a hub for ships and naval training, and the resulting engine noise is drowning out local marine life as they try to communicate. So the orcas,...
View ArticleA study of astronaut twins will give NASA some key genetic insight
Twins have long been scientists’ favorite human subjects for testing how genes interact with environmental factors. But what about when one of the twins isn’t on Earth at all?That's the case for Mark...
View ArticleHow maps are saving lives as Nepal recovers from its earthquake
Nama Budhathoki was working on his Ph.D. in the US when a huge earthquake hit Haiti in 2010.A student of mapping, he quickly noticed that initial recovery efforts in Haiti lacked good, detailed maps of...
View ArticleAs Chile's climate changes, the world's oldest mummies are turning moldy
Here's a story about some unlikely victims of climate change: Not polar bears stranded by melting ice or Pacific atolls battered by rising sea levels, but long dead natives of northern Chile whose...
View ArticleHow do you save the whales? Slow down the ships
Two different kinds of giants roam the waters off Southern California’s coast: container ships and blue whales.Unfortunately for the whales, sharing the waters with the big cargo vessels means taking...
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El Niño is back, and global temperature records are in danger
Drought in Australia; an end to drought in Brazil; poor crops across Asia; record global temperatures. If you start hearing about these in the next year, remember this news from the week:El Niño is...
View ArticleA promising gene editing method causes ethical controversy
The ability to re-engineer the human genome isn’t new: Scientists have been splicing and editing genes for decades. But promising new methods, like one called CRISPR, are making the technology cheaper...
View ArticleDesalination is an expensive energy hog, but improvements are on the way
It seems simple enough: Take the salt out of water so it’s drinkable.But it’s far more complex than it appears at first glance. It’s also increasingly crucial in a world where freshwater resources are...
View ArticleScience crunched Billboard's charts to determine music's most revolutionary...
When you think of evolutionary biologists, crunching the last 50 years of Billboard Hot 100 charts may not be the first thing that comes to mind.But Armand Leroi, a professor of evolutionary...
View ArticleThe Internet may be hurting all of us
There's a lot to love about the Internet: You don't need to be on campus to go to college; long-lost connections are just a tweet or post away; and whether you need groceries or a cab, there's an app...
View Article‘It’s worse than any site I’ve been to:’ radioactivity and a Missouri...
A mother near St. Louis puts her oven timer on for 15 minutes as she lets her children play in her backyard.When it goes off, she steps outside to smell the air and make sure it’s not full of smoke and...
View ArticleForget chemotherapy — try some genetically modified lettuce to fight your...
There’s a lot of fear surrounding genetically modified fruits and vegetables. But what if scientists could engineer food to cure cancer?New research suggests scientists can use plants to deliver a type...
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Astronauts could soon be blasting space junk with lasers
Space junk is a serious problem.There's lots of garbage orbiting our planet, everything from nuts and bolt to old satellites and used-up rocket stages. "There are over 500,000 pieces of debris that are...
View ArticleThe world's longest animal population study has bad news for wolves
The predator-prey relationship is an ancient tale. And at Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, located on an island in Lake Superior, scientists watched wolves and moose play out that relationship for...
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'The situation is desperate' for monarch butterflies, but here's the plan to...
The United States, Canada and Mexico share borders and trade agreements, and now a new plan announced this week by the White House might have the three countries cooperating around butterflies and bees...
View ArticleScience isn't just 'boys with toys,' and these 'girls' can prove it
In a recent interview, male astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni said that many scientists are just "boys with toys." So women in STEM fields took to Twitter to prove him wrong.Using the hashtag...
View ArticleSchool bus pollution is dangerous, and efforts to control it are still uneven
The federal government says diesel exhaust likely causes lung cancer, asthma attacks, chronic bronchitis and heart disease. Yet millions of children ride school buses powered by diesel fuel — and stand...
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