‘Killer Hurricanes’ reconstructs the past to predict storms of the future
In 1780, a powerful hurricane swept across the islands of the Caribbean, killing an estimated 22,000 people; 5,000 more died of starvation and disease in the aftermath. “Our planet is…
Photons are caught behaving like superconducting electrons
Light is a fan of the buddy system. Photons, or particles of light, have been spotted swapping energy with partners. This chummy behavior resembles how electrons pair up in materials…
Scary as they are, few vampires have a backbone
Halloween horror aside, vampires are really pretty spineless. Most have no backbone at all. By one count, some 14,000 kinds of arthropods, including ticks and mosquitoes, are blood feeders. Yet…
These spiders may have the world’s fastest body clocks
WASHINGTON, D.C. — If it takes you a while to recover from a few lost hours of sleep, be grateful you aren’t an orb weaver. Three orb-weaving spiders — Allocyclosa…
Coconut crabs are a bird’s worst nightmare
Imagine you’re a red-footed booby napping on a not-quite-high-enough branch of a tree. It’s nighttime on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and you can’t see much…
New setup for image recognition AI lets a program think on its feet
Artificial intelligence is getting some better perspective. Like a person who can read someone else’s penmanship without studying lots of handwriting samples, next-gen image recognition AI can more easily identify…
Mini brains may wrinkle and fold just like ours
PHILADELPHIA — Flat brains growing on microscope slides may have revealed a new wrinkle in the story of how the brain folds. Cells inside the brains contract, while cells on…
U.S. religion is increasingly polarized
There’s both inspiring and troubling news for holiday worshippers. Unlike other historically Christian Western nations, the United States is not losing its religion, say sociologists Landon Schnabel of Indiana University…
The sun’s outer atmosphere is far more complex than previously thought
NEW ORLEANS — Despite its smooth appearance, the sun’s wispy outer atmosphere is surprisingly full of knots, whorls and blobs. Newly analyzed observations from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft show that the…
The science behind kids’ belief in Santa
Over the past week, my little girls have seen Santa in real life at least three times (though only one encounter was close enough to whisper “yo-yo” in his ear).…