January can be a bleak month. The weather is cold, the skies are gray and there is a persisting spike in heart attacks. Researchers have identified that people are more heart attack prone in January and December than in other months of the year. This phenomenon doesn’t appear to be weather-related, and scientists are trying…
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It’s clear that Hunga involved an unusually explosive recipe that may not be easily replicated. For about a month, the eruption had progressed as expected—moderately violent, with gas and ash, but manageable. Then everything went sideways. That appears to be the result of at least two factors, Cronin says. One was the mixing of sources…
In ecology, as in comedy, timing is everything. Hours, minutes or even seconds can make the difference for an animal between stumbling upon a predator and avoiding one, between finding a bush loaded with berries and discovering branches that have already been gnawed bare. Mere moments can determine whether a raccoon comes face-to-face with a…
Starry night sky with aurora over the hills getty Each Monday I pick out the northern hemisphere’s celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead, but be sure to check my main feed for more in-depth articles on stargazing, astronomy, eclipses and more. What To See In The Night Sky This Week: January 16-22, 2023…
Sloths are surprisingly stronger than their adorably dopey expressions suggest, which makes sense given they live their lives dangling from trees literally by their bony fingernails. Puzzlingly, in spite of using all four limbs to grip onto branches, sloths seem to be extra strong on their left side compared to their right. New York Institute…
The Dallas Zoo said on Friday afternoon that a clouded leopard that had been missing all day had been recovered after officials said they found a “suspicious” tear in the animal’s enclosure. Nova, who weighs 25 pounds, was found on the zoo grounds at 4:40 p.m. local time “very near the original habitat, and teams…
In the prologue to his 2020 book, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, Brian Christian tells the story of the beginnings of the idea of artificial neural networks. In 1942, Walter Pitts, a teenage mathematician and logician, and Warren McCulloch, a mid-career neurologist, teamed up to unravel the mysteries of how the brain worked….
Invasive species introduced by humans to new regions can also be markers, the scientists said. The inadvertent import of alien species in the ballast water of ships arriving in San Francisco from Asia transformed the San Francisco Bay. “There was a point where 98 percent of the mass of all of the animal species in…
This artist’s concept depicts the 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer-wide) asteroid Psyche, which lies in … [+] the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Psyche is the focal point of NASA’s mission of the same name. The Psyche spacecraft is set to launch in 2023 and arrive at the asteroid in 2029, where it will orbit for…
When it comes to finding life outside of our Solar System, planets that closely resemble Earth seem like a good place to start. We can now welcome celestial object TOI 700 e to that group of promising leads. TOI 700 e has been confirmed orbiting inside the habitable zone of its star, TOI 700. That’s…