Recently a friend asked me if I knew about frost flowers. No, I’d never heard of them, other than knowing a hard freeze spells the demise of ordinary flowers. Time for some research. According to the National Weather Service website (https://www.weather.gov/lmk/frost_flowers) — Frost flowers are thin layers (perhaps credit card thickness) of ice that are
What is the most dangerous insect? For us humans, it’s the mosquito, hands down. Cockroaches do not really fit into the danger category. Some of the approximately 4600 species do carry allergens, and they can carry sickness-causing bacteria, though there’s little evidence linking them to disease outbreaks. Yet when it comes to invoking sheer terror,
Everyone wants to be popular, right? So what can you do to increase your popularity quotient? Actually, I’ve just found an article that claims your key to popularity is what you don’t do. And as a bonus, not doing these can make you happier as well as more popular! Here is a list of nine
If you think humans are the most efficient at building cities and other intricate structures, you may have overlooked another species — ants. An abandoned colony of grass-cutter ants was located, and scientists decided to study it in depth. First they filled the empty chambers and passageways with concrete. Then they excavated around the concrete
If you are looking for a new game to play with your pet rat, may I suggest hide-and-seek? Neuroscientist Juan Ignacio Sanguinetti of the Humboldt University of Berlin does just that. Drawing inspiration from YouTube animal videos (really!) he has taught rats to play hide-and-seek. His work was recently published in the journal Science. The
No, this is not a joke. It’s just a great “what if?” — if dinosaurs were alive today, how would veterinarians treat them? Like all wild animals, dinosaurs had difficult and violent lives. Scientists who study fossils can identify all kinds of wounds and injuries. For instance, a tyrannosaur skeleton has been found with a
There has been a lot of talk recently about how some think the next target for our manned space exploration should be Mars. But if you examine the details about time and distance, and consider the limitations of our rocket technology, there’s a compelling case for sending women. And maybe it should be only women.
In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a media blitz on climate change. I’ve found a little tidbit in this blizzard of information that shows the unusual connections among life on this planet. This involves the impact of whales on the climate. Or more specifically, whale poop. According to a study by International Monetary
Egypt has a problem. Both the cost of living and the rate of divorce are increasing. Egyptian divorces rose by almost seven percent in 2018 compared to 2017; it’s now 2.2 divorces for every thousand citizens, up from 1.9 in 2010. At the same time, the marriage rate has fallen from a little over 10
I have been reading in Astronomy magazine about the wonders of our solar system, like the landscape of the dwarf planet Ceres (in the October 2019 issue) and the possibilities of life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Every time we send out an interplanetary probe, we are surprised at what we find. And