NASA’s Opportunity rover has gone into survival mode while waiting for a historically large dust storm on Mars to pass — or for the vehicle’s batteries to run out. Opportunity charges its batteries with solar panels, so a storm such as this that blocks the sun and turns the Martian day to night poses a […]
Sunlight shapes oil spills’ long-term legacies. In the days and weeks after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, sunlight hit the oil slicks on the surface of the water. That triggered chemical reactions that added oxygen to oil molecules that once were just chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. These […]
MADISON, Wis. — When eggs go bad, bacteria usually get the blame. But some bacteria help bobtail squid keep their eggs fresh. Bacteria that female Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) deposit in the jelly surrounding their eggs can fight off a fungus called Fusarium keratoplasticum, Spencer Nyholm reported July 9 at the Beneficial Microbes Conference. […]
Climate change could make a showy invasive milkweed called a bloodflower even more of a menace for monarch butterflies than it already is. Monarch caterpillars, which feed on plants in the milkweed family, readily feast on Asclepias curassavica. Gardeners in the southern United States plant it for its showy orange blooms, yet the species “is […]
Like a submarine Poké Ball, a new robotic device gently captures and releases deep-sea creatures without a scratch. This critter catcher could be decked out with cameras and other sensors to give scientists an unprecedented view of life in one of Earth’s most mysterious environments. The contraption, designed to be mounted on a remotely operated […]
The first known fossil remains of a baby snake have turned up in a hunk of amber found in Myanmar. The critter, a new species named Xiaophis myanmarensis, met its untimely demise about 99 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, an international team of researchers reports July 18 in Science Advances. How do we […]
Most people probably don’t think of beavers until one has chewed through the trunk of a favorite tree or dammed up a nearby creek and flooded a yard or nearby road. Beavers are pests, in this view, on par with other members of the order Rodentia. But a growing number of scientists and citizens are […]
The search for life on Mars just got a lot more interesting. For decades, scientists have looked at the dry and dusty planet and focused on finding regions where life could have taken root billions of years ago, when the Martian climate was warmer and wetter. But on July 25, researchers announced they had spotted […]
Curiouser and curiouser: Strange metals are getting a little stranger. Normal metals such as copper and aluminum are old hat — physicists have a strong grasp on the behavior of the electrons within. But strange metals behave in mysterious ways, and researchers have now uncovered an additional oddity. A type of strange metal called a […]
An astronomical calling card, tentatively attributed to mysterious dark matter, seems likely to be due to a more mundane source. An unexplained glow of high-energy light from the center of the Milky Way, first spotted in 2009, raised scientists’ hopes of better pinning down dark matter (SN: 11/20/10, p. 11). That unidentified substance has been […]