In the 1990s, a troupe of hippies spent two years sealed inside a dome. They ended up starving and gasping for breath. As a new documentary Spaceship Earth tells their story, we meet the ‘biospherians.’
The Department of Health announced Friday there are now 11 cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) statewide.
The world produces more and more single-use plastic every year. Here’s how you can cut back.
The search for the “elixir of youth” has spanned centuries and continents – but recently, the hunt has centred on the Okinawa Islands, which stretch across the East China Sea. Not only do the older inhabitants enjoy the longest life expectancy of anyone on Earth, but the vast majority of those years are lived in remarkably good health too.
You aren’t what you eat, exactly. But over many generations, what we eat does shape our evolutionary path. “Diet,” says anthropologist John Hawks, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “has been a fundamental story throughout our evolutionary history. Over the last million years there have been changes in human anatomy, teeth and the skull, that we think are probably related to changes in diet.”
If it weren’t for horses, Joey Krug might not have ever gotten into ethereum. Growing up in the small farming town of Knoxville, Illinois, he and his younger brother used to ride their bikes through fields of corn and soybeans looking for trouble. One day, when he was about 9 years old, Krug came across the farm of a local school teacher, who raised and rode horses. He instantly fell in love with the powerful creatures, and pedaled home as fast as he could to ask his parents for one.
Much like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, the fern Azolla filiculoides proves that the small can certainly pack a punch. This minuscule water fern, which has leaves the size of a single gnat, was the focus of a 2018 study published in Nature Plants. Scientists say the bright green plant is complete with unique capabilities — and has the potential to help us mitigate the effects of climate change.
Under a microscope, human sperm seem to swim like wiggling eels, tails gyrating to and fro as they seek an egg to fertilize.
But now, new 3D microscopy and high-speed video reveal that sperm don’t swim in this simple, symmetrical motion at all. Instead, they move with a rollicking spin that compensates for the fact that their tails actually beat only to one side.
A Florida mom shared a heartbreaking photo on Facebook of her 3-year-old lying in anguish in a waist-to-ankle cast after breaking his leg at a trampoline park. Alongside the picture, which has been shared more than 275,000 times, the mom posted a warning to other parents: “Toddlers should be no where near trampolines.”
The first people to colonize a world beyond our solar system may have trouble describing their new home to the folks back on Earth.
The nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, lies 4.2 light-years from us — so far away that it would take tens of thousands of years to get there using current technology. And most stars, of course, are much more distant than that; our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years wide.