Wing patterns, flight dynamics create “motion dazzle” effect, make it harder to gauge speed, direction. Old-fashioned striped barbershop poles turn in place on a vertical axis, but humans typically perceive the stripes moving upward rather than turning with the pole. It’s a well-known visual illusion arising from processing biases…
Eating less protein as larvae may limit their ability to produce proteins as adults. Back in the 1930s, scientists noticed that water fleas and rats fed restricted diets while young went on to live longer. The same effect has since turned up in fruit flies and mice. What we…
The design requires less energy to capture CO2 than current systems. Equipment to capture carbon dioxide from ambient air or smokestacks generally works through a sort of reversible filter. Air is passed through granules or a liquid that absorbs the CO2, then that CO2-loaded substance undergoes a process (usually…
19th century Nature account of 1841 train delayed by geomagnetic storm got year wrong—due to a typo. The infamous Carrington Event of 1859 has long been considered the first extreme space weather event, but there have been reports of minor disturbances to telegraph equipment during geomagnetic storms since the…
Renewables easily cover changes in US demand, which is rising by 2% in 2026. Normally, we try to update you quarterly on what’s going on with the US electric grid since it provides a nice view of developing trends and smooths out some month-to-month randomness. Unfortunately, I was out…
NASA’s PRIMA mission will use spare parts from Webb to do major science at a lower cost. The first in a new class of space telescopes is on track to reach the launch pad in the early 2030s, NASA announced this week. The PRIMA mission will be the first…
A bad press release makes a good excuse to look at how developmental biology works. Late last week, we started seeing headlines about how new research was suggesting we might have two brains instead of the one that seems to show up on MRI scans. As is so often…
Post-eruption imaging of the Hunga caldera gives new details of its collapse. Krakatau, a volcanic island in Indonesia, killed more than 30,000 people when it erupted in 1883. One might assume that volcanic debris posed the major threat, yet many of the victims died from a tsunami caused by…
First paper added to community collection is a roadmap for research. Last year, the Trump administration did what it could to shut down work on the next US National Climate Assessment, eliminating funding for the US Global Change Research Program and booting hundreds of contributing authors. The administration even…
Pending move comes over the objections of the NIH director. On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control.…
