Darwin's Natural Selection Still at Work in Humans

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  588 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

The evolutionary process that Charles Darwin discovered almost 150 years ago, responsible for transforming dinosaurs into birds and allowing the walking ancestors of whales to take to the seas, is still quietly at work in humans today. Darwin's natural selection is the process by which nature rewards those individuals better adapted to their environments with survival and reproductive success. It works at the level of genes, sections of DNA that encode for proteins serve as the software of life. [Read More]

Hemophilia: Causes, symptoms & treatment

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  9 minutes  |  1756 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

Hemophilia is a rare bleeding disorder that prevents the blood from clotting properly. People with hemophilia either lack or have very low amounts of a specific clotting factor: a protein that promotes blood clotting and controls bleeding.  As a result, the blood can't clot as efficiently, and a person may bleed for a longer period of time after a relatively small trigger, such as bumping an elbow, said Dr. Stacy Croteau, medical director of the Boston Hemophilia Center at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. [Read More]

Here Come the Macy's Balloons, There Goes Our Helium?

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  862 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

On Thanksgiving, enormous balloons of popular characters from cartoons, comics and animated TV shows and movies make their much-anticipated appearance in a stately procession down New York City avenues, part of the traditional Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, now in its 91st year.   Helium is what keeps these balloons aloft — approximately 300,000 cubic feet (8,495 cubic meters) of helium, Live Science previously reported, which is roughly the same volume as three-and-a-half Olympic-size swimming pools. [Read More]

Odd Mammal Thought Long Extinct in Australia May Still Live

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  628 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

A critically endangered mammal thought to be extinct in Australia since the last ice age may still exist there, a new study suggests. That speculation comes from the discovery that at least one long-beaked echidna, an egg-laying mammal thought to exist only in New Guinea, was found in Australia in 1901 and that native Aborigine populations reported seeing the animal more recently. The 1901 specimen, described in the Dec. 28 issue of the journal Zookeys, had been shot and stuffed and was lying in a drawer, long forgotten, in the Natural History Museum in London. [Read More]

Polar Explorer Shackleton's Lost Ship Could Be Hidden Under Antarctic Ice

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  973 words  |  Patria Henriques

In one of the most epic stories in the history of polar exploration, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew had to ditch their bid to be the first to cross Antarctica when the steam-yacht Endurance became trapped by ice in the Weddell Sea, from February until November of 1915. Now, just over a century later, another scientific expedition will search of the wreck of the Endurance. The loss of the Endurance forced Shackleton and his 27 crewmembers to escape across the ice to Elephant Island, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. [Read More]

Sneaky Cat Caught on Camera in Himalayas

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  2 minutes  |  386 words  |  Patria Henriques

An elusive thick-furred feline has been caught on camera for the first time in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. A camera trap captured images of the fluffy Pallas's cat, also known as the manul, in the country's sprawling Wangchuck Centennial Park (WCP), which is also home to the snow leopard and Himalayan black bear. Pallas's cats had never been documented in the region before, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). [Read More]

Space Radiation May Kill You, But Your Mold Will Live On

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  508 words  |  Patria Henriques

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Mold can be nasty when you find it on your walls, your food, or you know, up in the International Space Station (ISS). Now, a new study suggests that mold is incredibly resilient to space radiation and can survive hundreds of times the dose that would kill a person. Mold reproduces through spores. Typically, these spores aren't harmful, but breathing in high doses of them can be, especially for someone who's sick or has a compromised immune system, said Marta Cortesão, a doctoral student in space microbiology at the German Aerospace Center in Cologne, who led the research. [Read More]

The 20 Cities Most Vulnerable to Flooding

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  2 minutes  |  253 words  |  Patria Henriques

Researchers have just figured out which cities across the globe face the highest risk from coastal flooding. To do so, they compiled data on 136 coastal cities with more than 1 million residents, looking at the elevation of the cities, the population distribution and the types of flood protection they had, such as levees or storm-surge barriers. They then combined that data with forecasts of sea level rise, ground sinking due to groundwater depletion, as well as population growth projections and economic forecasts of gross domestic product (GDP). [Read More]

The Story Behind Earth's Coldest Temperature Ever

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  457 words  |  Trudie Dory

During the southern hemisphere winter of 1983, temperatures at Russia's Vostok research station in Antarctica plunged to a frighteningly cold minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 54 degrees colder than the winter average there and the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Scientists have now figured out why it got so cold. For comparison, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the lower-48 United States was minus 70 degrees F (-57 degrees C) at Rogers Pass, Mont. [Read More]

Vampire squid fossil 'lost' during the Hungarian Revolution rediscovered

 Posted on January 27, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  758 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

Vampire squid have been lurking in the dark corners of the ocean for 30 million years, a new analysis of a long-lost fossil finds.  Modern-day vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) can thrive in deep, oxygen-poor ocean water, unlike many other squid species that require shallower habitat along continental shelves. Few fossil ancestors of today's vampire squid survive, though, so scientists aren't sure when these elusive cephalopods evolved the ability to live with little oxygen. [Read More]