BlogPaper

If you're shopping for that someone who loves to learn and is just curious about the world, how about a book? Here's a look at some of the best book deals on Amazon this Cyber Monday that are sure to dazzle the science lover in your life. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Picador, 2015) Five major extinctions have taken place over the course of Earth's geologic past; each wiped out significant portions of life on the planet. [Read More]

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Apoptosis, sometimes called "cellular suicide," is a normal, programmed process of cellular self-destruction. It helps shape our physical features and organs before birth, and it rids our bodies of unneeded or potentially harmful cells, including cancerous ones. But apoptosis also can kill too many cells after a heart attack or stroke, causing tissues to die. [Read More]

Paleontologist Jack Horner has always been a bit of an iconoclast. In the 1970s, Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and his friend Bob Makela discovered a Maiasaura nesting site, painting the first picture of dinosaurs as doting moms and dads. He's also been at the forefront of research suggesting that dinosaurs were fast growing and warm-blooded. But Horner's newest idea takes iconoclasm to a new level. [Read More]

In a heartbreaking scene, researchers watched a dead, newborn orca get pushed around the water's surface by its mother only a half-hour after the baby whale was seen alive in Puget Sound Tuesday (July 24). The calf was the first orca born to this declining population in three years, The Olympian reported. Researchers are unsure what caused the orca calf to die so soon after it was born, but they know this particular group of large marine mammals have been struggling for decades. [Read More]

Torture and atrocities are often downplayed by those inflicting the pain. Now, research reveals how attempting to justify the behavior of one's own group literally alters memory. In the new study, people from the United States listened to accounts of torture and war crimes shared by Afghani or American soldiers. Researchers found that the listeners clung to their memories of the justifications for these crimes only if they heard another American telling the tale. [Read More]

A magnitude-7.8 earthquake that shook Nepal in April killed some 9,000 people and injured 23,000 more, but the death toll in the valley of Kathmandu could have been much worse, researchers say. The quake shook in a way that spared many small buildings in the city but devastated those more than two stories high, a new study finds. The reason the shaking occurred in that way, the geologists say, is that the quake moved east rather than west, accelerating the ground at about 5. [Read More]

In the event of a future mass extinction, rats may be the animals best suited to repopulate the world, some scientists say. And if rats did "take over" after such a wipeout, they'd likely balloon in size, scientists also say. Mass extinctions have hit the Earth at least five times in geologic history, most recently about 65 million years ago, when scientists think an asteroid hit the planet and wiped out the dinosaurs. [Read More]

Both women and men prefer female leaders who have lower-pitched voices to ones with higher voices, even in stereotypically female positions, according to a new study. When given a choice between a hypothetical high-pitched or low-pitched candidate for parent teacher organization president or school board member, people more frequently chose the lower-pitched voice, according to the research detailed online this week in the journal PLoS One. The researchers used hypothetical candidates and thus couldn't say how much real candidates are judged by voice, but the results suggest voice pitch may be one of the factors people use to judge candidates, said co-author Casey Klofstad, a political scientist at the University of Miami. [Read More]

Ski balletFrom downhill ski ballet set to music, to synchronized skating, to the fastest non-motorized sport on Earth, Live Science explores the wacky and wonderful winter sports that didn't quite make the cut. Above: The name of this sport says it all: a graceful performance involving flips, rolls, jumps and spins, all performed while skiing down a gentle slope. Later, music was added to the downhill acrobatics. The Winter Olympics featured ski ballet, now known as acroski, as a demonstration sport in the 1988 Games in Calgary, Canada, and the 1992 Games in Albertville, France. [Read More]

Tornadoes aren't the only storms that meteorologists can chase: A group of researchers in Utah is showing through its use of portable, truck-mounted radars to peek inside winter storms. "For students who love snow, it's every bit as thrilling as chasing tornadoes," said atmospheric scientist and avid skier Jim Steenburgh, of the University of Utah. "That's why we call it storm chasing, Utah style." The Storm Chasing Utah Style Study, or SCHUSS (the term for a straight, downhill ski run), makes use of a Doppler on Wheels (DOW) radar truck operated by the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colo. [Read More]