1+ day, 23+ hour ago  (901+ words) Saliva sweeps through your mouth constantly, washing over teeth, tongue and gums, carrying whatever bacteria it picks up along the way. Nothing stops a microbe from traveling from one side of the mouth to the other. Somehow, the bacteria do…...

2+ day, 22+ hour ago  (892+ words) When geologists find unusually thick oceanic crust, they usually reach for the same explanation. A mantle plume, which is a column of hot rock rising from deep within Earth, melts its way upward and builds vast volcanic plateaus. The idea…...

4+ day, 22+ hour ago  (540+ words) Taken as the Orion spacecraft traveled toward the Moon, the image shows our planet suspended among several striking features of the solar system." Earth appears bright and fully illuminated, yet the sunlight we usually associate with such a view is…...

5+ day, 15+ hour ago  (841+ words) Climate scientists who project future sea level rise generally assume that ice sheets respond to warming in a gradual and somewhat predictable way. As temperatures increase, the ice retreats at a pace that can be estimated with climate models. However,…...

5+ day, 15+ hour ago  (916+ words) Surface temperature readings from the equatorial Atlantic tend to run flat. The record there has been stable enough that researchers had little reason to look deeper for surprises. A sediment core from the seafloor changed that. Chemical signals locked in…...

6+ day, 5+ min ago  (1068+ words) The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs filled the sky with dust and soot for years. Sunlight faded, and the oceans turned cold and dark. The fossil record shows something that still surprises scientists " life held on better in the dimmest,…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago  (792+ words) Watching someone else wince makes the next injection hurt more. Back in a room where you once felt pain, sensitivity rises before anything has touched you. Both experiences are real " and until now, no one had traced the exact brain…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (847+ words) Large earthquakes can rattle active volcanoes into brief bouts of unusual liveliness. That much has been documented. What researchers couldn't determine easily is whether a jolted volcano is genuinely closer to erupting " or is just briefly disturbed. In 2017, a magnitude…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (922+ words) In the early hours of February 24, 1979, seismographs at the University of Utah picked up an earthquake beneath a small town called Randolph, near the Idaho and Wyoming borders." It registered magnitude 3. 8 " substantial enough that people should have felt it. Nobody…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (520+ words) For most of the past century, wildlife scientists have mainly treated hunting as a threat to be contained. The worry was that pulling animals out of a population makes it shakier, prone to booms, busts, and eventual collapse. A study…...