Astronomers have identified thousands of planets orbiting distant stars using sophisticated observatories. But there’s something they have yet to spot with any certainty: moons around those worlds. Now a recent discovery around a Saturn-size planet 635 light-years from Earth offers one of the best potential clues that exomoons orbit exoplanets …
Read More »Is Bone Broth Really Brimming With Health Benefits?
Q: I’ve heard that bone broth has a ton of health benefits. Is there any truth to that? On TikTok, influencers and medical professionals seem to agree: Bone broth does a body good. Drinking the golden-brown elixir, they say, can alleviate joint pain, soothe digestive discomforts and smooth skin, among …
Read More »NASA Launches Europa Clipper to Explore an Ocean Moon’s Habitability
Europa Clipper, the biggest interplanetary spacecraft that NASA has ever built, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Monday afternoon. The mission will tackle one of biology’s core questions: Can life exist anywhere else in our solar system? The spacecraft’s destination is Europa, a moon of Jupiter, …
Read More »How Global Warming Made Hurricane Milton More Intense and Destructive
Hurricane Milton walloped Florida with at least 20 percent more rain and 10 percent stronger winds than a similarly rare storm would have done in a world that humans hadn’t warmed by burning fossil fuels, scientists said on Friday. As a result, Milton may have caused roughly twice as much …
Read More »Hairballs Shed Light on Man-Eating Lions’ Menu
In British East Africa in 1898, two lions living along the Tsavo River were hungry. This was bad news for the workers building a railroad there. They would retreat to their tents at night and, come morning, some of the men would be missing, the latest victims of big cats …
Read More »What Flying in a Wind Tunnel Reveals About Birds
It happens every fall: The days grow colder, the nights grow longer, the birds grow restless and then they take flight. In North America alone, billions of birds fly south for the winter, sometimes in enormous undulating flocks. It is one of nature’s great spectacles as well as an athletic …
Read More »Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Moves Like the Solar System’s Biggest Kickball
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is one of the solar system’s most astonishing marvels. An elliptical storm with inky swirls of burnt orange and dulled copper, it is longer than the Earth is wide, and its winds screech through the tops of the planet’s clouds at 400 miles per …
Read More »What, Exactly, Is ‘Moderate Drinking’?
Over the past several years, there has been a rise in alcohol-related deaths and a steady wave of news about the health risks of drinking. Calls for people to drink only in moderation have become more urgent. But what, exactly, does that mean? “Tongue in cheek, people have defined it …
Read More »3% of American High Schoolers Identify as Transgender, First National Survey Finds
About 3.3 percent of high school students identify as transgender and another 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity, according to the first nationally representative survey on these groups, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday. Transgender and gender-questioning teenagers reported alarmingly higher rates of bullying …
Read More »How Does It Feel to Win a Nobel Prize? Ask the ‘Godfather of A.I.’
On Tuesday, the scientists John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that helped drive the development of artificial neural networks — a technology that is now essential to the operation of search engines like Google and online chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI. …
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