Chemically, Earth Is Basically a Less Volatile Version of the Sun
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 530 words
| Fernande Dalal
Our sun is a lifeless, fiery ball of gas fueled by a nuclear inferno. Earth, meanwhile, is a rocky, layered planet covered by water and teeming with life. Nevertheless, the elemental composition of these two celestial bodies is surprisingly similar.
The elements in the sun and Earth are pretty much the same, though Earth had less of the sun's more volatile elements, which evaporate at high temperatures, a new analysis reveals.
[Read More]Girl's Brown Recluse Spider Bite Turns Into Open Wound
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 2 minutes
| 322 words
| Arica Deslauriers
When a little girl's spider bite developed into a nasty open wound, doctors had to perform two procedures to remove blackened, dead tissue from her leg, researchers say.
Five days after being bitten by a spider, the girl — a 10-year-old living in northeast Mexico — developed a 2-inch lesion of dead tissue, along with swelling and a fever. Researchers suspect the bite came from a brown recluse spider, a venomous spider that is most commonly found in the south and central United States, including Texas.
[Read More]Has the Large Hadron Collider Disproved the Existence of Ghosts?
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 460 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might be the world's most incredible science experiment. A particle collider seventeen miles in circumference, it accelerates protons to velocities approaching the speed of light and slams them together. Enthralled scientists from all over the world watch the subatomic demolition derby and record what happens. Thus far, they've witnessed the creation of quark-gluon plasma (the densest matter outside of black holes), found key evidence against supersymmetry, and discovered the Higgs boson, a result which garnered the Nobel Prize in Physics.
[Read More]Here's How to Watch the Insight Landing on Mars on Monday
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 516 words
| Trudie Dory
Tomorrow, humanity will once again reach out and touch the surface of a foreign world. After seven months traveling across our solar system, NASA's InSight Lander is scheduled to touch down on the flat plains of Elysium Planitia on Mars on Monday at 3 p.m. ET.
But though this landing is taking place 91 million miles away from Earth, people on this planet will still have the opportunity to watch the historic event.
[Read More]Huge Ancient Civilization's Collapse Explained
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 5 minutes
| 1058 words
| Patria Henriques
The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say.
Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of the world population.
[Read More]Oddly heavy particle may have just broken the reigning model of particle physics
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 6 minutes
| 1188 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
(opens in new tab)An ultraprecise measurement of the mass of a subatomic particle called the W boson may diverge from the Standard Model, a long-reigning framework that governs the strange world of quantum physics.
After 10 years of collaboration using an atom smasher at Fermilab in Illinois, scientists announced this new measurement, which is so precise that they likened it to finding the weight of an 800-pound (363 kilograms) gorilla to a precision of 1.
[Read More]Pimp My Blimp: New Luxury Airship Planned
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 460 words
| Fernande Dalal
It's a blimp. It's a plane. No, it's an airship with 5,000 square feet of living and/or cargo space, according to plans announced by a company that makes surveillance and advertising dirigibles.
The planned Aeroscraft ML866 is much more than an advertising blimp or one of those huge passenger dirigibles of the 1930s, said Edward Pevzner, business development manager at blimp-maker Worldwide Aeros Corp. It can be finished as a personal yacht, a business commuter craft or cargo carrier, he said.
[Read More]Scientists Develop New Laser That Can Find and Destroy Cancer Cells in the Blood
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 4 minutes
| 724 words
| Fernande Dalal
Cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body through the blood. And now, researchers have developed a new kind of laser that can find and zap those tumor cells from the outside of the skin.
Though it may still be a ways away from becoming a commercial diagnostic tool, the laser is up to 1,000 times more sensitive than current methods used to detect tumor cells in blood, the researchers reported June 12 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
[Read More]This Bird 'Eyeball' Survived 120 Million Years
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 525 words
| Patria Henriques
Scientists have discovered a surprisingly "visionary" detail about a dinosaur-age bird that had a tooth-filled beak: It could likely see in color.
An analysis of the 120-million-year-old bird revealed that the creature's eye tissues — more specially, its rods and cones — had fossilized in remarkable condition. (Whereas rods sense grey tones, cones detect colors.)
"We discovered a fossilized bird eye with soft tissue for the first time in the world,"
[Read More]US Monsoon Season Set to Make Annual Debut
Posted on January 6, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 468 words
| Trudie Dory
The word "monsoon" may conjure up images of a relentless downpour pelting some exotic locale, but the fabled rainy season comes every year to the United States, and may make its annual debut this coming weekend.
And a monsoon doesn't just mean rain.
"Surprisingly, the real definition of a monsoon is basically a seasonal shift in the wind. That happens in various parts of the world, and we have ours in the southwestern parts of the U.
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