Ria Misra

Is the Ice on Pluto Slippery Enough for You to Fall On?

It’s been a good day for Pluto and its fans: Already, we’ve learned that we were underestimating its size (sorry, little friend!) and that those ice caps atop the almost-planet are made of methane and nitrogen ice. But what would stepping out on that ice be like? Perhaps not quite how we’re used to. In…

These Are the Spiky Exoskeletons of Creatures That Once Roamed the Seas

They look a little like model rockets or blown-glass Christmas ornaments, but these are the oceanic skeletons of the ancestor of a creature that you’re probably pretty familiar with. A new study in Science Advances looks at the strange fossils of a comb jelly ancestor from over 500 million years ago, and reconstructed these 3-D…

Which Story of a Scientific Discovery Would Make a Great Movie?

We love the wave of scientist biopics that’s been hitting us recently, but sometimes there’s one story that’s so good we wish the movie would just stay there. So, which story from the annals of science would make a fantastic movie? Tell us the scientific story you’d like to see on screen right now. Be…

This Is How the Curiosity Rover Sees the Sun from Mars

Curiosity, our favorite little Martian space robot that could, has a new line item to add to its resume: weather-robot. With NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft (which usually monitors solar flares) currently out of range, researchers got to wondering just what Curiosity might be able to tell us about the sun from its vantage point on Mars.…

How to Bake Pi Uses Math to Solve the Cookbook Paradox

There is a lie running through your cookbooks. No, it’s not that you can substitute crackers for apples in your pie and no one will know the difference (though, come on, let’s be decent to each other, folks: Knock that off.) The lie goes much deeper than all that, and is the source of what…

This Is How Your Fruits and Vegetables Look in an MRI Machine

Hey! What are your plans for that artichoke you’ve got there? You’re going to grill it and serve it with some lemon-butter sauce? That’s cool. We’re just going to stick ours in this MRI machine here. Alexandr Khrapichev, a professor at the University of Oxford, put together this selection of what he calls “virtually-sliced” fruit…

The ISS may finally get its space veggie garden yet! This is actually the second attempt at getting lettuceseeds to sprout in the growing chamber, after the first one ended with some frantic overwatering to perk the dehydrated plants back up. Astronauts! They’re just like us. Image: Scott Kelly setting up the Veggie experiment on…

This Is the One Reason Why Farms Are Only Going to Keep Getting Bigger

People may wax rhapsodic about the virtues of the small-scale farm, but that is not the direction farming is heading in: Farms are getting fewer in number and larger in size across the board, and that’s only going to continue—and there’s one reason why. That reason is neatly summed up in this little chart from…

This Peculiar Pattern Is Showing Up in Places All Over the Universe

You probably best recognize it as the shape of a surf wave, but that’s only the beginning. They’re called Kelvin-Helmholtz waves—and from our own oceans to the outer reaches of space, they’ve been showing up everywhere. Scientists actually first started identifying the pattern as Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in the 1800s, but people have been noticing them…

A Shiny Space Suitcase Will Tell Us If There’s Water on Asteroid Bennu

It may look like a cross between a mylar balloon, a suitcase, and an old-school gas mask, but it’s actually a highly sophisticated sensing instrument. And it’s going to tell us whether there’s water on an asteroid or not. This is NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer (OVIRS) and it’s going to be part of…

Where did the records for the tiles lining the space shuttle disappear to? The database on the life of each and every one of the 24,000 tiles has itself gone missing. In some cases, NASA still has tabs on the tiles themselves, but some have made their way out into the world, both deliberately or…

What Are You Reading?

The weather’s warming and the pages are turning. To me, my summer reading lists! What books have you been reading this summer? Fill us in on the details of your latest reads or your latest to-be-reads, and what you thought of them. Still looking for your next novel, biography, or DIY manual? Then ask for…

A Collection of Curious Six Word Science Fiction Stories For You To Read

A Mars rover that’s not quite as alone as it thought, a jarred brain with a very bodied complaint, a robot with an authority problem, and an unsettlingly quick sloth are just some of the curious specimens that await you in these stories. You responded to this call for six word science fiction stories with…

America Is Overproducing So Much Milk Farmers Have Started Burying It

Unable to figure out how to offload the small ocean of milk they’ve produced, dairy farmers have landed on an unorthodox solution: They’re burying it by the truckload. Bloomberg shared this taleof what dairy farmers are doing to deal with the huge surplus of milk they’ve made: Agri-Mark, a 1,200-dairy cooperative in New England that…

Scientists Just Solved One of the Paradoxes Behind Giant Black Holes

There is a paradox in the universe: scientists believe that there are millions more giant black holes in the universe than we know about, and yet, if they are there, how would they remain hidden? It turns out they do so by hiding in something almost unbelievably common. They’ve been hiding in the clouds. Not…

A Mid-Construction Redesign Made An Incredibly Powerful Radio Telescope

Out in Manchester, a remarkably powerful, 3,200 ton radio telescope has sat atop a field for almost 60 years. But the story of how it got there—and how near it came, even mid-construction, to not being there—is a tale of an incredibly close scientific call. Bernard Lovell had big plans to use his experience reading…

This Chart Shows Why We’re Not Nearly Worried Enough About the Drought

So you may have heard that there’s a drought going on, robbing Americans of their god-given rights to enviously plush lawns, refillable hot springs, and a bottomless bowl of almonds on every table. But the real trouble is yet to come. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organizationput together this heat chart of which crops are…

Write Us Some Six-Word Science Fiction Stories!

I want to hear a story, io9. And I want to hear it in just six words. Will you explore the corporate uses of time travel (“Amazon’s time machine processes returns, delivers” – destor23)? Or perhaps you’ll stick to slightly spooky error messages from our very real space robots (Mars Rover Offline: Unauthorized Firmware Update…

The Truth About the Scientific Method: It’s Much Messier Than You Think

Scientific labs are in the business of uncovering truths. But, when you look a little closer at how they work, there’s another truth coming out of them: The process to getting there is a lot messier than it looks from the outside. io9’s comment of the day comes from commenter Tenaj, who shared this tidbit…

This Is Where The Opinions Of Scientists And The American Public Split

On evolution, genetically-modified foods, animal research, and global climate change, America’s scientists are almost all going one way—and the general public is going the other. This graphicfrom the Pew Research Center looks at the gaps between opinions on scientific issues, by contrasting surveys first given to members of the American Association for the Advancement of…