Blog Profile / Science & Health from Newser
| URL : | http://www.newser.com/section/6/science-health-news-headlines.html | |
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| Filed Under: | Academics / General Science | |
| Posts on Regator: | 3517 | |
| Posts / Week: | 20.9 | |
| Archived Since: | March 4, 2010 | |
Blog Post Archive
Louisiana Is Shrinking, Thanks to Giant Swamp Rats
When it comes to invasive species, Louisiana may have Florida and its giant snails beat: The state's beloved swampland is literally vanishing at the hands of gigantic swamp rats. Nutria—described by a documentarian tracking the creatures as "a cross between a beaver and a New York sewer rat"—are...
Have Japanese Scientists Just Found Atlantis?
The storied island of Atlantis was thought to have existed somewhere between South America and Africa, but it's been strictly the stuff of legend for millennia. Possibly until now: A manned Japanese submersible has discovered a huge granite mass off Brazil's coast that looks like it could be a lost...
Billions of Red-Eyed Cicadas to Swarm East Coast
Any day now, billions of cicadas with bulging red eyes will crawl out of the earth after 17 years underground and overrun the East Coast. The insects will arrive in such numbers that people in the southern state of North Carolina to Connecticut in the northeast will be outnumbered roughly...
Bashful? Now You Can Buy Viagra Online
Pfizer Inc., in a first for the drug industry, tells the AP that the drugmaker will begin selling its popular erectile dysfunction pill Viagra directly to patients on its website. Men still will need a prescription to buy the blue, diamond-shaped pill on viagra.com, but they no longer have...
Neil Armstrong's Moon Heartbeat Up for Auction
A unique piece of space memorabilia is hitting the auction block later this month—the first heartbeat on the moon. The electrocardiogram taken the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon is among 85 Apollo 11-related items being auctioned, including the joystick used to control the module's landing, PC...
This Man Claims He Owns the Moon
Calling it the biggest loophole in the world doesn't quite capture its reach: Dennis Hope claims that he owns the moon—and our solar system's planets—due to what the Outer Space Treaty doesn't say. Mashable reports the treaty has been the guiding document on space law since 1967, and...
Early Humans Loved to Eat Brains: Study
Our evolutionary ancestors were hungry for braaaiiins—antelope brains, that is. Sets of animal bones recently unearthed in Kenya are the earliest evidence of hominid hunting, showing previous members of the human family enjoyed digging into the heads of antelope and wildebeests, as well as snacking on gazelle meat, Science...
Meet RoboBee, World's Smallest Flying Robot
The Guardian calls it the "smallest flying robot in the world," DVice has it as the "world's smallest aerial drone," and USA Today settles for "electronic housefly." By whichever name, the dime-sized device by Harvard scientists is amazing. (They call it "RoboBee," for the record.) It has two tiny...
Watch a Solar Wave Burst Out of the Sun
NASA has released a seriously cool video of a massive solar wave—what the cool kids call a "coronal mass ejection"—that its Solar Dynamics Observatory captured over a 2.5-hour stretch yesterday. While these kinds of sun storms have been known to mess with satellites or even power grids...
Greenhouse Gas Levels About to Hit Bad Milestone
We're probably going to hear a lot about the "Keeling curve" and references to "400 parts per million" in the coming days and weeks. The curve measures the ratio of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, and that ratio is about to cross the 400-ppm level for the first time...
Girl's Skeleton Confirms Cannibalism at Jamestown
Scientists say they have the first physical evidence of a grisly truth from Jamestown: Colonists in the brutal winter of 1609 resorted to cannibalism, reports USA Today. Anthropologists studying the partial remains of a teenage girl—including her skull, jaw, and leg bone—say they bear the unmistakable marks of...
Mathematician Finally Cracks POW's Coded Letters
British soldier John Pryor sent letters home to his family from a Nazi POW camp for five years during World War II. Seventy years later, they finally know what he actually wrote. A mathematician at Plymouth University has deciphered the coded messages hidden inside the innocuous-looking letters for the first...
Fish Use ... Sign Language?
Fish might have more going on in their fishy brains than thought, a new study suggests. Researchers found that at least two types—groupers and coral trout—use what amounts to sign language to help their hunting partners, reports LiveScience. The finding plays off another unusual trait: Both fish are...
NASA Spots Colossal Saturn Hurricane
The hurricane roiling around Saturn's north pole looks a lot like a hurricane on Earth—except much, much bigger. Its eye is about 20 times bigger than Earth standards at 1,250 miles wide, and the storm is also more powerful, with winds as high as 330mph. A NASA probe...
Inside the Fight for Junior Seau's Brain
An in-depth report from Frontline and ESPN's Outside the Lines describes the fight for Junior Seau's brain following his suicide last year—a fight that ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, who are working on a book and documentary about brain injuries in football, call "a scientific backroom brawl....
New Malaria Strains Beat Best Drug
Scientists are scrambling to stay a step ahead of a fast-evolving strain of malaria-causing parasite that has developed resistance to artemisinin, the most important drug used to fight the disease. Researchers examining the DNA of malaria parasites from around the world found three separate artemisinin-resistant strains in western Cambodia that...
Earth's Core as Hot as Sun's Surface
For two decades, scientists have thought the Earth's solid core was a balmy 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit or so, based on the temperature that iron crystallizes when under high pressure. But new research using X-rays to examine iron under huge amounts of pressure indicate the real temperature of the core...
For First Time, We Can Hear Alexander Graham Bell
The Smithsonian has released a nifty video that allows us to hear the voice of Alexander Graham Bell for the first time, reports the Verge. "Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell," the inventor says in the recording, made in 1885 at his lab in DC. The wax disc had been...
Doctors: Cancer Drug Prices 'Astronomical,' Unethical
More than 100 cancer specialists from more than 15 countries are joining together to call for lower drug prices, suggesting that the current prices—which can range as high as $138,000 a year—are unconscionably high, and could be seen as profiteering. "Advocating for lower drug prices is a...
Colbert: NASA's Penis Doodle Proves Our Cosmic Might
The United States has its problems, but Stephen Colbert thinks that NASA's latest feat clearly shows America's cosmic might—that feat being an image of a penis left on Mars. The Internet erupted after a photo of the seemingly phallic track patterns the Curiosity rover left in the red planet's...