Legions of metal nuggets swirl about our solar system. Metallic asteroids number in the millions, but they're relatively quite rare?bits and pieces of lonely matter that never became planets.Occasionally, they find a home. A tiny fraction of these dull, misshapen hunks of metal have rained onto our planet for millennia, sparking briefly alight as they kiss the atmosphere before biting deep into the planet's surface?if they aren't incinerated first.An even smaller fraction make it to
Beans, beans, the musical fruit! The more you eat, the more you toot! Well, not according to this oldie-but-goody study (published in 1984, doubleplusgood!). Here, scientists had 12 men eat kidney beans for 23 days and measured how much they farted. It turns out that the gas quantity didn't change during that time, no matter if the men typically ate a lot of beans or not. However, the longer they ate the beans, the better they felt (less discomfort). So let's eat beans for every meal!Inf
These days it's hard to find a place on Earth where humans haven't interfered in some way. Venture to the most remote jungle or the depths of the Mariana Trench and you've likely been preceded by some emissary of humanity, whether that's chemicals carried on the wind or something more tangible.But there are places where our long shadow has never reached, where the events of the past 100,000 years might as well have never happened. Locked deep below gargantuan sheets of ice thousands of f
The maximum extent of sea ice after a winter of growth was well below average ? an area of lost ice about two-thirds the size of AlaskaAfter expanding all winter, the Arctic's floating lid of sea ice has now reached its maximum extent ? and it has continued an unsettling trend.The National Snow and Ice Data Center announced today that this year's maximum extent is the second lowest in the 39-year record of satellite observations."The four lowest maximum extents in the satellite rec
Flying foxes ? also known as fruit bats ? have an elastic membrane that stretches from their fingers (they also have thumbs) to their toes, making them incredibly aerodynamic and agile while flying. For the engineers at Festo, a German automation company, bats are the perfect specimen for bioinspired drones.The Bionic Flying Fox has a wingspan of more than 7 feet, is almost 3 feet long and weighs a little more than 1 pound, according Festo's website. For comparison, living, breathing fly
CO? averaged about 410 parts per million in the atmosphere during the last week of March. Ten years ago, it averaged ~387 ppm in that week.I spotted the animation above on Twitter the other day. It illustrates the growth of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a novel and particularly compelling way, so I thought I'd share it here.The animation shows how the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has changed week-by-week and year-by-year starting at the beginning of Janua
I first spotted a still image of this striking comma-shaped storm on Twitter. Captured by the GOES-16 weather satellite, the storm had already blown across part of the United States, dropping rain and snow along the way, and out into the Atlantic.Had it hugged the coast instead of pushing farther eastward, it would have been the fifth nor'easter in a row for the battered East Coast. Luckily, it did not. So now we can simply marvel at this meteorological wonder.Here's that still image
The trout lily is a North American spring wildflower that's cuter than its name suggests. Dappled leaves frame a little yellow blossom that keeps its face shyly toward the ground. Inside the bloom, the flower's anthers and pollen vary from bright yellow to dark red. Researchers could find no purpose for the different colors?except, maybe, to satisfy the whims of pollinating insects.Plenty of flowers come in multiple petal colors, and other research has explored the reasons, write Uni
The vertiginous video also offers an opportunity to consider theories posited by two of the giants of sciencehttps://youtu.be/Wfoy_OvNDvwWhile on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station over Mexico, NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik captured this spectacular, vertiginous video with a GoPro camera.I spotted it in a NASA Tweet yesterday, and when I watched it, I really did have the sensation that this would be as close as I'll ever come to experiencing free-falling around the Eart
When we think of the organs that help humans stay alive under the water, the heart and lungs top the list. But there's another organ that deserves recognition as well, though few of us would think to name it. It's the spleen.Mammals have a unique response to having our faces engulfed by water. Our heart rate slows and peripheral blood vessels constrict, shunting blood to vital organs where it's needed most. At the same time, our spleens release a cache of red blood vessels held for this