Fob Blog
Even the microwave oven in your kitchen is not immune to bacteria. The irradiating environment within a microwave oven might seem inhospitable to microbes. But swabs from microwave ovens in several different locales identified over 100 bacterial strains, researchers report August 7 in Frontiers in Microbiology. This is the first time that scientists have documented […]
Contrary to a previous report, there’s no evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way’s most massive and luminous globular star cluster, a new study finds. Instead, a hive of much smaller black holes diving into and out of the tightly packed star cluster’s center can explain the movement and distribution […]
It’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere — but you wouldn’t know it from the thermostat. On August 26, a remote stretch of the coastline in Western Australia experienced the highest winter temperature ever recorded anywhere in the country: a blistering 41.6° Celsius (107° Fahrenheit). In Bidyadanga, an Aboriginal community in Western Australia, the overnight low […]
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? “[The findings] “It really builds into an emerging picture that’s a little more nuanced of an extinction than we […]
When the virus that causes mpox jumped onto the international stage in 2022, countries around the world, including the United States, turned to vaccines targeting the closely related smallpox virus to curb its spread. Yet it wasn’t until 2024 that Africa, the continent where the virus emerged and first began spreading among people, received its […]
For the first time, scientists have measured a long-sought global electric field in the Earth’s atmosphere. This field, called the ambipolar electric field, was predicted to exist decades ago but never detected, until now. his animation shows how the ambipolar electric field works. The most abundant gas in the lower atmosphere, the part we live […]
Among the more than 500 species of bacteria that thrive in the human mouth, one seems to play by its own rules. Rather than reproducing by splitting itself in two, like most bacteria do, Corynebacterium matruchotii divides into as many as 14 cells simultaneously, researchers report in the Sept. 10 Proceedings of the National Academy […]
For the first time, astronomers have watched gas boil and bubble on the surface of a distant star. Scientists observed the red giant star R Doradus with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile over the course of four weeks in July and August 2023. The series of images shows large cells of […]
Transcript James McCall: Solar production in the US really started to pick up around 2012. As solar really became mainstream, there was a lot more concerns of land use changes. Sujith Ravi: If you look at the type of land that’s been converted for solar installations, over 60 percent of those landscapes are converted croplands. […]
Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the fantasy realm of steampunk, a genre of literature, film and other creative media. Theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern sees her specialty, the field of quantum […]