Why Do People Love to be Scared?
Posted on December 14, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 493 words
| Fernande Dalal
Every Halloween, Americans spend millions on scary fun. From haunted houses to horror movies, teens as well as adults seem to crave a good spine-chilling scare.
"People go to horror films because they want to be frightened, or they wouldn't do it twice," said Jeffrey Goldstein, editor of "Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment" (Oxford University Press, 1998) and professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
[Read More]Ancient Scorpion Had Feet, May Have Walked Out of Ocean
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 4 minutes
| 700 words
| Arica Deslauriers
A new scorpion species found fossilized in the rocks of a backyard could turn the scientific understanding of these stinging creatures on its head.
The fossils suggest that ancient scorpions crawled out of the seas and onto land earlier than thought, according to the researchers who analyzed them. In fact, some of the oldest scorpions had the equipment needed to walk out of their watery habitats and onto land, the researchers said.
[Read More]Ancient Wari Queen Brought to Life with Stunning Re-Creation of Head
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 632 words
| Fernande Dalal
At first glance, the wrinkled face of a dark haired-woman wearing round, gold earrings looks incredibly real. But it's not — it's a reconstruction crafted from modeling clay, based on the skull of a Wari queen who lived about 1,200 years ago in what is now Peru.
Peruvian and Polish archaeologists unearthed the queen in a pyramid mausoleum known as El Castillo de Huarmey (Huarmey's castle), located north of Lima, in 2012.
[Read More]Arctic sinkholes open in a flash after permafrost melt
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 540 words
| Trudie Dory
Arctic permafrost can thaw so quickly that it triggers landslides, drowns forests and opens gaping sinkholes. This rapid melt, described in a new study, can dramatically reshape the Arctic landscape in just a few months.
Fast-melting permafrost is also more widespread than once thought. About 20% of the Arctic's permafrost — a blend of frozen sand, soil and rocks — also has a high volume of ground ice, making it vulnerable to rapid thawing.
[Read More]Astrophysicists figure out the total amount of matter in the universe
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 4 minutes
| 740 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
The stuff that makes up our universe is tricky to measure, to put it mildly. We know that most of the universe's matter-energy density consists of dark energy, the mysterious unknown force that's driving the universe's expansion. And we know that the rest is matter, both normal and dark.
Accurately figuring out the proportions of these three is a challenge, but researchers now say they've performed one of the most precise measurements yet to determine the proportion of matter.
[Read More]Colorful Sea Pens Decorate Ocean Floor
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 2 minutes
| 403 words
| Trudie Dory
As their name suggests, sea pens can look like writing pens, or they can resemble feathers, whips or worms. But these diverse and delicate underwater animals, which are a type of coral, are also hard to pin down: A single sea pen is both an individual and a colony.
"All corals can be looked at in two ways; they can be looked at as a colony or they can be an individual with many mouths,"
[Read More]Colossal Statue of Egyptian Pharaoh Discovered in Mud Pit
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 526 words
| Patria Henriques
Archaeologists have discovered a colossal statue, possibly depicting Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses the Great, in a muddy pit in a Cairo suburb, Egypt's antiquities ministry announced today (March 9).
Split in fragments, the quartzite statue was found by Egyptian and German archaeologists in the heavily populated Ain Shams and Matariya districts, where the ancient city of Heliopolis — the cult center for sun-god worship — once stood.
Indeed, the statue was found in a courtyard near the ruins of the sun temple founded by Ramses II, better known as Ramesses the Great.
[Read More]Earth's Magnetic Field is A Ruthless, Solar-Wind-Shredding Machine
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 4 minutes
| 710 words
| Patria Henriques
As Earth cruises through the black sea of space at about 67,000 mph (108,000 km/h), the planet's magnetic field pushes aside solar wind — the constant stream of plasma particles ejected by the sun — the same way the bow of a speeding motorboat pushes aside water. Scientists call this phenomenon "bow shock" because of its similarity to a ship surging through stubborn waves.
Researchers have long suspected that we can thank this bow shock for reducing the scorching solar wind into the mild breezes we feel on Earth, but they didn't know exactly how this happened.
[Read More]Eating Fat Doesn't Make You Fat, Study Finds
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 5 minutes
| 907 words
| Fernande Dalal
It seems logical to think that eating a high-fat diet would tip the scale upward, but a new study suggests that might not be the case. What's more, eating more of certain types of fats may help move the scale in the other direction.
Men and women in the study who followed a high-fat, Mediterranean diet that was rich in either olive oil or nuts lost more weight and reduced their waist circumference more than the people in the study who were simply instructed to reduce their fat intake, according to the study.
[Read More]Medieval Graveyard Found Under Cambridge University
Posted on December 13, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 448 words
| Trudie Dory
Hundreds of skeletons from a medieval graveyard have been discovered beneath Cambridge University in England.
Archaeologists got a rare chance to excavate one of the largest medieval hospital burial grounds in Britain, amid a project to restore the Old Divinity School at St. John's College (part of Cambridge University). The researchers unearthed more than 400 complete burials among evidence for more than 1,000 graves.
Most of the burials date to the period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, according to Craig Cessford, an archaeologist at Cambridge University who led the excavation and published the results in the latest issue of the Archaeological Journal.
[Read More]