Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
One day our human descendants may be able to go sightseeing in the glorious Saturn system. Until then, we have Cassini.
In the newly released video below, it almost feels as if you are peeking out of a spaceship window as it flies over the hexagon-shaped jet stream on Saturns north pole and then…
The making of a memory champion, it turns out, is not so different from the making of any other great athlete.
To triumph in sport, athletes sculpt muscle and sinew and lash them together with head and heart to deliver optimum performance. To perform extraordinary feats of memorization, memory…
It seems modern humans arent the only ones to have had regional cuisine. According to the plaque on their teeth, Neanderthals had striking differences in their diets, depending on where they lived and they may have also used plants and mold to treat illness and pain.
The findings, described…
You are living in an amazing time on planet Earth mineralogically speaking.
Scientists say there are more unique minerals on our planet than ever before in its 4.5-billion-year history, and its thanks in part to us.
In a paper published this week in American Mineralogist, a team of researchers…
Its been clear for a while now that pregnant women who become infected with the Zika virus are more likely to have babies with microcephaly, neural tube defects and other serious problems. Now experts can say just how much bigger that risk is for these babies: 20 times greater than if their mothers…
Indiana Jones may have found a few more lost temples if hed known a thing or two about plants. By mapping the distribution of tree species with known archaeological sites in the Amazon basin, scientists have discovered that humans shaped the makeup of the Amazon forests over thousands of years.
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Scientists have found what they claim are the oldest-known fossils on Earth, embedded in Canadian rocks that are at least 3.7 billion years old.
If they are right, the discovery suggests that life on Earth began within 200 million to 500 million years of the birth of the planet 4.5 billion years…
The earthquake risk for Oklahoma and southern Kansas is expected to remain significant in 2017, threatening 3 million people with seismic events that can produce damaging shaking, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey forecast released Wednesday.
The seismic risk is forecast to be so high that…
The Food and Drug Administrations restrictions on the dispensing of mifepristone one half of the two-drug cocktail used to end a pregnancy in its first 10 weeks no longer makes clinical sense and should be expeditiously withdrawn, experts argue in the New England Journal of Medicine.
As…
A Long Beach woman has pleaded guilty to helping smuggle gun parts and thousands of rounds of ammunition to the Philippines.
The Long Beach Press-Telegram says 61-year-old Marlou Mendoza entered the plea Monday and could face up to 15 years in federal prison.
Her son, Mark, remains a fugitive.
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Soak up these rainy days, Southern California. They are not going to last forever.
Summer will be here before you know it, and if recent trends continue, it will likely be a hot one.
Globally, 2016 was the warmest year on record. Here in Los Angeles, temperature records were shattered last summer…
Frogs and amphibians can nab an fly with remarkable speed but the real secret of their bug-catching prowess is in the saliva.
Unlike human spit, sticky frog saliva is a non-Newtonian fluid. That means it behaves as both a liquid and a solid.
This unusual combination of tongue and saliva allows…
A tiny wrinkled sack with a big mouth and no anus may well be the earliest-known of humans forebears. Meet Saccorhytus coronarius, a 540-million-year-old critter the size of a grain of sand, whose fossil remains were discovered in China.
Scientists say Saccorhytus is the most primitive of the…
The ponderosa pine had taken root decades before the Revolutionary War, making a stately stand on this western Sierra Nevada slope for some 300 years, Nate Stephenson figures.
Then came the beetle blitzkrieg. Now the tree is a dab in the gray and rusty death stain smeared across the mountain range.
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Theres a revolution coming to your supermarket, and its going to start in the tomato aisle.
After more than a decade of study, researchers at the University of Florida have identified the chemical compounds responsible for giving a great tomato its distinctive sweet, earthy, slightly grassy taste….
Why do so few women end up in physics, mathematics and other fields traditionally associated with brilliance? Part of the answer may lie in what happens to girls by the time theyre out of kindergarten.
A new study finds that 6-year-old girls are less likely than boys to think members of their…
It may not be the most romantic way to spend Valentines Day, but Dr. Georges Benjamin had been looking forward to a trip to Atlanta.
On Feb. 14, he said, he was scheduled to speak along with former Vice President Al Gore at the opening session of a conference hosted by the Centers for Disease…
A postelection survey of primary care physicians reveals that majorities of the doctors that first treat most Americans do not support some of the GOPs most widely circulated plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Conducted in December and January and published online Wednesday in…
The newly discovered mighty traveler of Egg Mountain is an ancient lizard that lived 75 million years ago.
Thats 10 million years before dinosaurs went extinct.
Paleontologists discovered the fossilized remains of two almost-complete skeletons of this extinct critter in a dinosaur nesting site…
In Washington, D.C., revelers and protesters are marking the ascendance of a new president and the populist movement he says he has mobilized.
Some 1,600 miles away in San Antonio, thousands of psychologists from around the world are also marking the dawn of the Trump era by focusing their attention…