Maddie Stone

Barely Any Americans Could Answer All of These Basic Science Questions

Earth’s hottest layer is the core, we use uranium to build nukes, and ocean tides are created by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Like, duh! But did you also know that the boiling point of water decreases with increasing altitude, or that amplitude determines the loudness of a sound wave? Huh? Maybe you’re a…

A Lava Ocean on Io Could Mean Better Prospects for Alien Life

Jupiter’s moon Io is an eruptive mystery. Based on scientific models, the tiny Jovian moon’s volcanoes flare up in the “wrong” places. How could that be? Well apparently, our models didn’t account for a massive subsurface ocean of lava. That’s right: According to a new NASA study, Io may be hiding an ocean of molten…

China Could Be the First Country to Land on the Moon’s Far Side

The far side of the moon has long been a tantalizing mystery. But China, a latecomer to the lunar landing game, could soon make history as the first country to touch its surface. State media reports from China this week confirm the country’s intention to send a Chang’e-4 landing probe to the far side of…

Sperm Whale Clans Speak Different Dialects

We humans pride ourselves on our cultural diversity, but we’re not the only creatures that form unique societies. Turns out, two clans of sperm whales living near the Galápagos Islands speak different dialects — offering yet more evidence that animals have culture, too. Sperm whales — massive, deep-ocean hunters that live in hierarchical social networks…

First Oxygen Appeared On Earth Way Earlier Than We Realized

If you hopped in the Tardis and traveled back four billion years, you’d find yourself on a hot, miserable wasteland of a planet with nary an oxygen molecule to breathe. Earth used to be an asphyxiating hellscape, but over the eons, tiny green microbes filled the air with oxygen. New research finds they’ve been at…

How to Spot a Black Hole

You don’t need to be a professional astronomer to find black holes. Here’s how you can spot one, using just your laptop or phone. Radio Galaxy Zoo is an online platform that allows cosmically-inclined individuals to make valuable contributions to astronomy, by identifying radio jets from supermassive black holes (SBHs) and matching these features to…

Even Spaceflight Will Be Impacted By Sea Level Rise

Sea level rise isn’t just a problem for coastal cities, it’s a problem for NASA. Two thirds of the space agency’s infrastructure, including the Kennedy Space Center, the Ames Research Center, and the Johnson Space Center stand between 5 and 40 feet (2 to 12 meters) above mean sea level. By the end of the…

Archaic Bell System Pitch Video Offers Topical Branding Advice

All week, the internet has been on fire over Google’s bold decision to transform its logo by axing those pesky and decidedly old-fashioned serifs. Guess what? Telephone companies figured that out decades ago. This 26-minute time warp is an actual pitch video, created by Saul Bass in 1969 to convince AT&T that Bell System telephone…

Astronomers Want to Watch Comets Slam Into Distant Planets

If a massive comet struck the Earth, the oceans would boiland the air would catch fire (don’t worry,this isn’t about to happen). But to alien astronomers studying our planet from afar, humanity’s brutal demise would look like nothing more than a faint flicker of light. If we could detect such impacts on distant worlds, we…

Get Lost in the Swirling Green Seas of a Massive Algae Bloom

The summer of 2015 will probably be remembered as one of fire, drought, and hot, hot weather. But it’s also been a summer of frightfully voracious, microscopic life forms. From Lake Erie to the North Atlantic, tiny green algae are multiplying like crazy. And there’s no better way to appreciate the sheer immensity of these…

Why We Can’t Stop Seeing Aliens on Mars

A crab! A spoon! A crashed UFO! Clearly, the Curiosity Rover is busy excavating the remains of an alien luau, and NASA totally didn’t tell us. The proof is right there! Except not exactly. You see, there a much simpler explanation for those infuriating alien artifacts that keep cropping up on the Red Planet. It’s…

Man Spends 14 Hours Riding the Longest NYC Subway Route

New Yorkers aren’t exactly known for taking leisurely strolls, but leisurely subway riding? The concept is as foreign as ketchup on pizza. That’s why most city slickers will have no idea that the longest non-repeating subway route is 155 miles and includes over 54 transfers. Why should they? Who on Earth is ever going to…

Earth’s Oceans Could Look Completely Different by the End of the Century

Beneath the swelling blue surf, ocean life is on the move. Marine species are swimming into new new communities and forcing others out. By the end of the century, the ecosystems that cover 70% of our planet’s surface will look completely different. “The changes we’re seeing in response to climate change are much faster than…

The four year evacuation of the Japanese town of Naraha has officially ended. All of the town’s 7,400 residents were sent away in 2011, after the nearby nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Today, the government says radiation has fallen to safe levels within the town. But it’s still unclear whether former residents will feel the same.…

Glowing Antineutrino Map Shows How Radioactive the Earth Is

It’s often said that we know less about Earth’s deep interior than we do about the surface of Mars (or at this point, maybe even Pluto). A new global map of subatomic particles called antineutrinos is helping to change that. It’s showing scientists just how radioactive our little Blue Marble is. The neutrino and its…

We’ve Never Seen This Many Massive Storms on the Pacific at Once

It was a historic moment in meteorology late last week, when three Category 4 storms were simultaneously spotted marching across the Pacific. As if that wasn’t ominous enough, a tropical depression has just added itself to the mix. Yesterday, NASA’s GOES satellite captured this beautifully ominous image (below) of one typhoon (Kilo), one hurricane (Jimena),…

Why Did 60,000 Antelope Drop Dead Over Four Days?

When 60,000 critically endangered saiga antelope dropped dead in central Kazakhstan in June, it had to have been a major bummer for the veterinarians who had just arrived to study the herd. Those wildlife vets have since become detectives, trying to unravel an Agatha Christie-worthy puzzle. Now they think they have a culprit, but it’s…

Robots Might Soon Be Writing ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books

Interactive fiction writing is a pretty niche market, but it’s one that we can’t seem to get enough of. Imagine how many more hours of Choose Your Own Adventure-style entertainment our kids could get lost in, if we could just build robots to write these stories. Guess what? We can. That’s right: Researchers at the…

A New Mission Will Search for Ripples in Spacetime

In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first bold attempt…

Réunion Wing Segment Is Definitely from MH370, Say French Officials 

French officials have just confirmed that the flaperon that washed up on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion in late July is “certainly” from MH370. Thank the merciful lord, that mystery was getting out of hand. For those who haven’t been following the saga, a brief bit of background: Late last month, a wing…