Jason Daley, Smithsonian
Last week, the Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii began oozing lava from 15 cracks in its East Rift Zone, destroying streets and burning up three dozen homes in the Leilani Estates subdivision. Officials are also warning residents of toxic sulfur dioxide emissions.
Loren Grush, The Verge
When NASA launches its next rover to Mars, the vehicle will have a small helicopter along for the ride. NASA announced today that it will be sending a small autonomous flying chopper aptly named the Mars Helicopter with the upcoming Mars 2020 rover. The helicopter will attempt to fly through the Martian air to see if vehicles can even levitate on Mars, where the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than that of Earth.
Greg Bishop, Science-Based Medicine
Of all the domesticated animals, cats are certainly the most polarizing; it's pretty hard to find someone who is just ambivalent towards cats. When you stop and think about it, they are an odd animal to have in our homes. Nowadays, we have them as companions, but it seems strange that several thousand years ago, we permanently befriended a small, self-absorbed carnivore. They can have serious attitude and seem to run on their own schedules.
Ethan Siegel, Forbes
Growing up is hard to do in the Universe. In the great gravitational dance of the cosmos, it's the biggest, most massive seeds that usually emerge victorious: attracting more and more matter towards them from whatever's around. In a molecular cloud that forms stars, this usually means the largest-mass clumps grow into stars, while the remaining mass gets flattened into a disk. Within this disk, smaller clumps form, growing into planets, moons, and other icy and rocky bodies.
Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today
Richard Phillips Feynman, who was born 100 years ago today, made his mark with contributions to particle physics, superfluidity, and quantum electrodynamicsthe last of which won him the 1965 Nobel Prize. That honor alone would have been enough to guarantee him a place in the history of science. He's also remembered for his ability to captivate a lecture hallthe Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964) are still in print.
Neuroskeptic, Discover
A new paper in ACS Chemical Neuroscience pulls no punches in claiming that most of what we know about the neuroscience of learning is wrong: Dendritic Learning as a Paradigm Shift in Brain Learning.According to authors Shira Sardi and colleagues, the prevailing view which is that learning takes place in the synapses is mistaken. Instead, they say, dendritic learning' is how brain cells really store information.
Erika Marn-Spiotta, Nature
In the past year, allegations of egregious sexual harassment and even assault have emerged across the spectrum of science. Nature has already run several stories on the topic just this quarter.When I talk to senior scientists, many view harassment as an injustice that happens somewhere else, not in their field or at their institution. But data suggest that the problem is ubiquitous.
Hannah Devlin, Guardian
Scientists are preparing to create miniature brains that have been genetically engineered to contain Neanderthal DNA, in an unprecedented attempt to understand how humans differ from our closest relatives.In the next few months the small blobs of tissue, known as brain organoids, will be grown from human stem cells that have been edited to contain Neanderthalised versions of several genes.
Adam Barrett, The Conversation
Understanding the biology behind consciousness (or self-awareness) is considered by some to be the final frontier of science. And over the last decade, a fledgling community of consciousness scientists have gathered some interesting information about the differences between conscious and unconscious brain activity.
Owen Jarus, Live Science
Ruins from the lost city of Mardaman, which dates back some 4,800 years, have been discovered in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, archaeologists just announced.A team from the University of Tbingen in Germany has been digging at the site for years now, but only last summer did they discover 92 cuneiform tablets hidden in a pottery vessel found in the remains of a palace.
Viviane Callier, Knowable Mag
In 2003, Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik created the first commercially successful electronic cigarette. Motivated by the death of his father, who was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer, Lik had a simple concept: to separate nicotine delivery from the carcinogens in cigarettes. Instead of burning tobacco, his device vaporized a nicotine-containing liquid, thus creating smoke-like vapor that could be inhaled.
Sabine Hossenfelder, Backreaction
I am a Princeton physics major who regularly reads your wonderful blog.I recently came across a curious passage in Brian Greene's introduction to a reprint edition of Einstein's Meaning of Relativity which claims that:
