On the 47th anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, former Navy pilot Brian Binnie flew a rocket-powered ship past the brink of outer space. Named SpaceShipOne, the ship cruised up 112 kilometers, then plunged back to Earth, wings flared like a shuttlecock to slow its descent. SpaceShipOne’s October 4, 2004, flight, the second in two weeks, earned […]
Two electrifying light shows were much more than flashes in the pan. A 2007 thunderstorm over Oklahoma produced a lightning flash that stretched more than 321 kilometers horizontally — roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to New York City. In southern France in 2012, a single lightning flash lit up the sky nonstop for 7.74 […]
Like lipstick on a collar, new DNA evidence is pointing to ancient affairs between bonobos and chimpanzees. Chimps carry a small percentage of bonobo DNA, researchers report in the Oct. 28 Science. The conclusion comes from analysis of the genetic instruction books, or genomes, of 63 wild-born chimps, two captive chimps named Clint and Donald, […]
Meet the San Andreas Fault’s newfound neighbor. Mapping deformations deep underground along the shoreline of a Southern California lake called the Salton Sea, seismologists discovered a fault that runs parallel to San Andreas’ southern end. The newly identified fault, dubbed the Salton Trough Fault, shakes up assessments of the potential for damaging earthquakes in the […]
SAN DIEGO — Babies as young as 5 months old possess networks of brain cell activity that react to facial emotions, especially fear, a new study finds. “Networks for recognizing facial expressions are in place shortly after birth,” Catherine Stamoulis of Harvard Medical School said November 13 during a news conference at the annual meeting […]
With no nipples and reptilelike eggs, short-beaked echidnas look like a first draft of a mammal. Yet, as Australia’s other digging mammals decline from invasive predators, the well-defended echidna is getting new love as an ecosystem engineer. The only mammals today that lay eggs are the four echidna species and the duck-billed platypus. Eggs are […]
SAN ANTONIO — Ancient Mesopotamians have traditionally been credited with inventing glassmaking around 3,600 years ago. But Mesopotamians may have created second-rate knock-offs of glass objects from Egypt, where this complex craft actually originated, researchers reported November 19 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Arguments that glass production originated in […]
New wastewater disposal regulations in Oklahoma will be enough to steady the state’s shaky ground, new research predicts. The injection of wastewater from oil and gas operations into underground wells has caused Oklahoma’s seismic activity to skyrocket (SN: 8/9/14, p. 13). In response, state regulators earlier this year ordered a 40 percent reduction in the […]
The spookiness of quantum mechanics has gone cosmic. Physicists have used starlight to perform a “Bell test” to verify the strange nature of quantum mechanics. For decades, such tests have repeatedly confirmed quantum physics’s quirks, but the tests contained loopholes. While the major loopholes have already been closed (SN: 12/26/15, p. 24), a lingering caveat […]
For pregnant women infected with Zika virus in the first trimester, the future is foreboding. Nearly 11 percent of U.S. women likely exposed to Zika in the early weeks of or just before pregnancy had babies or fetuses with birth defects, researchers report online December 13 in JAMA. The new study offers the first results […]