Trains have been the fundamental backbone of transportation and shipping for a few hundred years. Despite the ubiquity of trains, the details of their workings are a bit of a mystery. Trains have come about as more of a feat of engineering than one of science. Thus, the detailed scientific theory of trains has remained…
Our understanding of animal cognition has grown dramatically since the days of Jane Goodall in the 1960s. Great apes, a family of primates which includes chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, are often the subject of psychological research. The present study explored an important aspect of social intelligence in these…
Large stars and planets in space have intense gravity. The gravity of these large celestial bodies is so strong, that they actually warp the empty space around them. Also, in space, time progresses differently when near celestial bodies. Because of these effects on space and time, space is regarded as a space-time…
If intelligent aliens exist somewhere in the depths of space, then should we see signs of their technology? This question has motivated scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to hunt for evidence of tell-tale signs of alien civilizations. But space is enormous, and any real effort to…
Our understanding of astrophysics states that we should be seeing co-orbiting planets when astronomers look through their telescopes. Co-orbiting planets are planets of roughly similar size that have overlapping orbits around their host star. These two planets orbit so closely to each other that they influence the…
Cancer is one of the greatest challenges of our time. A common misconception about cancer is that it is one disease. There are hundreds of unique types of cancers that all require different treatment strategies. This diversity in cancer types is one reason curing cancer is so difficult. The advances in medicine over…
You are on one of those trips where the travel is so tedious that even your cell phone looks boring. Not being able to sleep, you look out the window to distract yourself. You see lots of plants, people along the road, birds disappearing in the distance, and you just can’t stop wondering — how did all this…
Animals are unable to tell us why they do the things they do, and curious scientists often want to find out. They set up experiments to see how animals behave in certain situations and try to determine the motivations for the behavior. The behavior often gives the animal a survival edge, as is the case for this study…
Nitrogen pollution is a big problem in standing water such as lakes and ponds. The nitrogen comes from many sources, often agricultural fertilizers. Some of this nitrogen is in the water, but the rest of it is actually trapped in the sediment at the bottom of the lake. You can see evidence of this pollution when a…
51 Pegasi b is a roughly jupiter-sized planet around a star pretty similar to our sun. This planet has been part of astronomy conversations before, as it is a huge planet with a really small orbit; this planet orbits around its star only every 4 days. For comparison, Earth orbits the sun every 365 days. One way of…
