Antioxidants Boost Sperm Quality
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 438 words
| Patria Henriques
You'd better eat your blueberries: Men who don't get enough antioxidants can have problems with infertility.
A study published online recently in the journal Fertility and Sterility discovered that men who ate antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables have better rates of sperm movement, ejaculate volume, and sperm concentration than those who ate diets heavy in meat and full-fat dairy foods.
Antioxidants have been the darlings of the nutritional world as of late — pomegranate juice, anyone?
[Read More]Arctic Ice Fields 'Receding Like Mad'
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 612 words
| Fernande Dalal
Ice fields on an Arctic island have shrunk 50 percent in the past 50 years and will be gone in 50 more, scientists said this week.
Located just west of Greenland, Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world, with an area of 196,000 square miles (about 508,000 square kilometers). That's larger than California.
A study published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters reveals the expanses of ice blanketing Baffin's northern plateau in the Canadian Arctic are smaller than at any time in at least the last 1,600 years.
[Read More]Dinosaur-killing space rock may have originated at the edge of the solar system
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 4 minutes
| 738 words
| Trudie Dory
The chunk of space rock that killed the nonavian dinosaurs may have been a piece of a comet that Jupiter's gravity kicked onto a collision course with Earth.
A new study suggests that the dinosaur-killing object was not an asteroid from between Jupiter and Mars, as is often hypothesized. Instead, the study authors argue, the impactor was a piece of a comet from the Oort cloud, a mass of icy bodies that surrounds the outer edges of the solar system.
[Read More]Happy Pi Day! Why Geeks Celebrate 3.14...
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 427 words
| Trudie Dory
If you're celebrating Pi Day today (March 14), then you're a certified math geek or physics geek or maybe even a tech geek. If you're just an outside observer, we thought you might like to know why all the hubbub over 3.1415926535 ... well, that could go on forever, so …
On Pi Day, pi enthusiasts wear clothing adorned with the pi symbol, eat pie, and even throw pi-related parties.
[Read More]Hundreds of Mysterious Stone Structures Discovered in Western Sahara
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 636 words
| Patria Henriques
Hundreds of stone structures dating back thousands of years have been discovered in the Western Sahara, a territory in Africa little explored by archaeologists.
The structures seem to come in all sizes and shapes, and archaeologists aren't sure what many of then were used for or when they were created, archaeologists report in the book "The Archaeology of Western Sahara: A Synthesis of Fieldwork, 2002 to 2009" (Oxbow Books, 2018).
[Read More]Image Gallery: Carnivorous Plants
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 2 minutes
| 370 words
| Fernande Dalal
Venus flytrapThere's something unsettling about the idea of meat-eating plants, as this trapped Pacific tree frog can attest. Venus flytraps are one of the few plants that can move rapidly enough to capture bugs (and sometimes small mammals) for digestion.
Pretty in pinkFound on every continent except Antarctica, sundews ensnare creepy-crawlies on their sticky pink stalks and then absorb the bugs' nutrients.
Ant walkAn ant walks a dangerous line in the maw of a Venus flytrap.
[Read More]Is West Texas Sinking Into a Hole of Its Own Making?
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 4 minutes
| 822 words
| Patria Henriques
Parts of West Texas are sinking — and other parts quaking and shaking — thanks to oil and gas extraction.
A new study using satellite data to measure ground changes near Pecos, Monahans, Wink and Kermit, Texas, finds multiple disturbances, including places where the ground is sinking up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) a year. In one spot, the ground dropped so much that it formed a new lake, Lake Boehmer.
[Read More]New World's Oldest Tomatillo Discovered
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 482 words
| Arica Deslauriers
A fossilized tomatillo, still in its papery shell, is the earliest fruit from the tomato family ever found in South America, researchers reported Oct. 30 at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver.
The 52.2-million-year-old tomatillo was discovered at the fossil-rich Laguna del Hunco, Argentina, where ancient lakebeds interlayer with volcanic ashes, providing paleontologists with precisely dated discoveries. (Minerals in the ash pin down the rock ages.)
"It's quite amazing,"
[Read More]Parts of Earth's Original Crust Exist Today in Canada
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 4 minutes
| 670 words
| Arica Deslauriers
Rocks from the eastern shore of the Hudson Bay in Canada contain elements of some of Earth's earliest crust, new research finds.
The rocks themselves are granites that are 2.7 billion years old, but they still hold the chemical signals of the precursor rocks that were melted and recycled to form the rocks that exist today. The new study, published online today (March 17) in the journal Science, finds that these precursors formed around 4.
[Read More]Science Fiction or Fact: Is Time Travel Possible?
Posted on February 16, 2023
| 5 minutes
| 1041 words
| Trudie Dory
In this weekly series, Life's Little Mysteries rates the plausibility of popular science fiction concepts.
In the first "Back to the Future" movie, all it took to travel through time was 1.21 gigawatts and a flux capacitor (packed into a DeLorean sports car for style points). Despite centuries of dreams and decades of bona fide research, flux capacitors remain beyond our grasp, as do any other time travel-enabling devices.
[Read More]