Nov 7, 2023 | Salon.com
Jor? spiders are brightly colored, as big as your hand, travel by a method known as ballooning — and, according to a recent study, they will soon be all over the eastern United States. But don’t worry — these spiders are not considered to be a threat to humans. They have a timid temperament and therefore do not attack humans; even if they did, their fangs are not sharp enough to penetrate human skin....
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Nov 6, 2023 | Salon.com
The word “Dinkinesh” is Amharic for “marvelous,” and the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh has lived up to its Ethiopian moniker: When the NASA spacecraft Lucy flew by what it had anticipated would be only one asteroid, it found two asteroids for the price of one.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement....
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Nov 3, 2023 | Salon.com
While the cartoon starfish Patrick Star from “SpongeBob Squarepants” is famously stupid, his real-life counterpart in science may in fact be all head. This at least is the conclusion of a landmark recent paper in the journal Nature, which solved a lingering puzzle about starfish anatomy by turning to the enigmatic echinoderm’s genes....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 3, 2023 | Salon.com
If you’re lucky, you are reading this article while in the same general area as a cat. Like most people who interact with cats, you no doubt would like to better understand the enigmatic complexity of its mind. Does the cat like you or is it hostile? What does it mean when it purrs, closes its eyes or raises its ears?...
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 2, 2023 | Salon.com
Back in the 1980s, Columbia University climatologist Dr. James Hansen was a lonely voice warning humanity about the threat of man-made climate change. Aside from a handful of politicians (including future US Vice President Al Gore), Hansen’s insights were largely ignored during that decade, though the fossil fuel industry was well aware of this growing problem and tried to downplay it....
Originally posted on salon.com
Nov 1, 2023 | Salon.com
Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that invades the nervous system and can trigger total paralysis in a matter of hours. It mainly targets children under age 5, and at one time disabled and killed thousands of American children every year. Today, all that is a distant memory. The World Health Organization recently estimated that, thanks to polio vaccines, “More than 20 million people are able to walk today who would otherwise have been paralyzed....
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Oct 31, 2023 | Salon.com
It is not pleasant to imagine that human activity is making the planet uninhabitable, but we typically think of this in terms of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels or acidifying the oceans. We aren’t typically concerned with how salty things are.
Yet a recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment identifies a wealth of industrial activities from construction and agriculture to water and road treatment as making the planet Earth too salty — literally....
Originally posted on salon.com
Oct 30, 2023 | Salon.com
Most of the recent news about the International Space Station (ISS) hasn’t been very positive recently, from Russian cosmonauts dodging a cooling leak during a space walk to NASA’s ongoing plan to crash the ISS into the ocean (which will largely benefit private space exploration companies). Yet in a major leap forward for biological sciences, a new study in the journal iSciences reveals that humans were able to successfully culture mouse embryos while aboard the ISS....
Originally posted on salon.com
Oct 30, 2023 | Salon.com
In early October 2023, it was reported that more than 120 pink river dolphins had been found dead in Lake Tefé, which is connected to the Amazon River. Local scientists hypothesize that the deaths occurred because the region has experienced record heat and drought, which in turn places the blame on human-caused climate change....
Originally posted on salon.com
Oct 28, 2023 | Salon.com
The concept of interstellar beings is pretty ancient, with even Greek philosophers pondering about the idea. But the concept of these beings acting maliciously is a relatively new one, which really took hold at the turn of the 19th Century thanks to H.G. Wells and his 1898 book “War of the Worlds.”...
Originally posted on salon.com