Under Naples, Italy’s busy streets, a sleeping titan stirs. For decades, the large, smoldering volcanic crater known as Campi Flegrei has been shaking, baffling researchers with its regular but non-eruptive movement. New studies now point to a secret offender: a brittle layer of tuff rock compromised by millennia of magma intrusions that absorbs volcanic gases ...
The night sky of June is expected to show a pair of amazing conjunctions one with the elusive Mercury and the other with a remarkably near encounter between the Moon and Mars. These events serve as a reminder of the clockwork accuracy of our solar system and an opportunity to see planetary motions that even ...
Found in seafood, pork, and energy drinks, taurine is an amino acid long praised as a possible fountain of youth. Research on animals revealed that increasing taurine levels could slow down aging, enhance metabolism, and perhaps increase lifespan. Published in Science, a radical new study challenges the theory that declining taurine is a universal driver ...
In the middle of Tanzania’s arid north sits a lake so hostile that it mummifies species unfortunate enough to come into touch. One of the most extreme environments on Earth, Lake Natron’s blood-red color and caustic chemistry allow flamingos to flourish but most animals choose “stone.” How does this dreamlike phenomena occur? The solution resides ...
An HIV diagnosis was thought of as a death sentence for decades. Millions of people living with the virus lead long, healthy lives today thanks to revolutionary medical advances. One still unresolved issue is whether HIV/AIDS can ever be totally cured. The response is more hopeful and complicated than you would think. Although ART can ...
The first time NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has observed a big magnetic burst in the sun’s corona, this event could fundamentally alter our understanding of solar storms and their impact on Earth. Against expectations, the spacecraft “touches” the sun’s atmosphere in daring close passes and finds a great surge of energy flinging high-speed plasma towards ...
When the most influential tech billionaire in the world and the U.S. president square off in a high-stakes game of political brinkmanship, what results? The response appears to compromise America’s supremacy in space. An explosive conflict between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump over a tax bill descended into threats last week that might compromise ...
Mathematicians all around have struggled with a theory so opaque for more than ten years that it was labeled the “alien’s language.” Developed by Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, the Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (IUT) runs over 2,000 pages and promises to solve the famous ABC conjecture a problem in number theory with great consequences for cryptography, ...
As science shows your cat knows exactly who you are by the scent of your armpits, ears, and even your toes, your cat may show indifference when you walk through the door. Using their strong sense of smell to identify familiar people, a ground-breaking study from Tokyo University of Agriculture has found that domestic cats ...
While the Grand Canyon’s 1.7-billion-year-old rock layers and 6-million-year-old chasm have long dominated America’s geological imagination, a far deeper and dramatically younger gorge has been hiding in plain sight. Hells Canyon, slicing 2,400 meters (7,900 feet) into the Idaho-Oregon border, is North America’s deepest river gorge, yet a groundbreaking study reveals it was carved in ...
