Science

A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals the link between breeding season and the hormone melatonin, made in the pineal gland in the brain during long winter nights. Castle-Miller et al have discovered how animals link the change in seasons to their …

Brazilian taxonomists have discovered and described three new species of the ‘bird-eating’ tarantula genus Avicularia from Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. Avicularia merianae, female. Image credit: H.-W. Auer. The description is published in a new issue of the journal ZooKeys, authored by Dr. Caroline Sayuri Fukushima and Dr. Rogério Bertani, researchers …

Archaeologists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) University Museum have uncovered a toy dating back as far as 1153 CE in an abandoned well in Ørland, Norway. The 850-year-old carved wooden boat from Ørland, Norway. Image credit: Åge Hojem, NTNU University Museum. “A thousand years ago, for …

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn has captured a breathtaking new image of Enceladus, the sixth-largest of the gas giant’s moons. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft returned a breathtaking image of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. This view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up and rotated 4 …

The True’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon mirus) is a poorly known member of the family Ziphiidae, second largest family of cetaceans (which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises). Little is known about its distribution, abundance and calving rate. However, an international team of researchers has now obtained the first images of a …

What you think of as “cold” really isn’t very cold in the grand scheme of things. Even the frigid depths of space are toasty by the standards of NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), an instrument being developed to study matter at extremely low temperatures. This device will head up to …

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is orbiting Mars to study the planet’s atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar winds. Also high on its list of mission-critical goals is not crashing into things. That one almost went out the window recently, as MAVEN was found to be on a collision course …

The Mars of today is a cold, dry husk with no life as far as we can tell. Even if there is still some hearty microorganism living on the Red Planet, it’s not suitable for human habitation without a great deal of protective equipment. A NASA talk given at the …

Frogs have the ability to see color even when it is so dark that humans are not able to see anything at all, according to a new study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. According to Yovanovich et al, frogs can see color in extreme …

Earth came into being roughly 4.5 billion years ago, and a new discovery in Canada indicates life developed not long after. Scientists studying ancient rock formations in Quebec have identified microscopic structures in the rock that they believe are the fossilized remains of microorganisms that lived on Earth between 3.7 …