To Understand Mars’s Water, Look to Antarctica

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When Alfred McEwen tells you a place on Mars has warm summers, don’t picture the Florida Keys—think Antarctica at its balmiest. McEwen, the lead scientist for the filing-cabinet-sized camera riding on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, took photos five years ago of dark, water-like trails on slopes where temperatures on summer days can sometimes reach the melting point of water. But to test to see if water really created the trails, the scientists needed more than ordinary photos. Full Article »

The Birds and the Bees Should Take a Lesson from the Octopus

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They sound like a typical couple. A male and a female share a home. They go about their business during the day but come together for meals. After dinner, they have sex, entwined in a face-to-face embrace.

Typical, perhaps, for humans. Yet this couple is a pair of larger Pacific striped octopuses, and their behavior defies what scientists thought they knew about these denizens of the deep. Full Article »

Study Finds Overlooked Relationship in Human Seafood Consumption

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Serve a scientist a plate of fish swimming with mercury, and she will tell you not to eat it. Pass a nutritionist a fish high in fatty acids, and he’ll extol the health benefits of your meal. But if these fish were one and the same—high in both a well-known toxin and a well-known nutrient—neither expert could recommend the fish. Full Article »

Starfish and Sextants

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Scope Correspondent

Every day in San Diego began the same way. I stood packed with other students in a tight lattice of ribs, elbows, and kneecaps, swaying as our rickety shuttle rumbled over the freeway, past a couple malls, and up a eucalyptus-lined hill to the university. The bus ride, just over a mile long, was almost always the most menial nine minutes of my day.

But one morning, the shuttle got stuck in traffic, jittering to a halt in the middle of the freeway overpass. Looking out the window, I found myself staring at the eight lanes of cars below. I was suddenly struck by how many there were—hundreds of hot metal vessels, crawling south to downtown and whizzing north towards Los Angeles. And all around us, there were more cars, patiently humming in three stopped lanes, jammed into parking lots by the road. These cars, I realized, were full of people I had never met and never would meet, each with their own concerns and stories, their own reason for rushing somewhere at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning. And these nameless people around me were barely scratching the surface. Full Article »

Spandrel

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Scope Correspondent

When I was two years old, I scared the living daylights out of my dad. He found me crouched down, inspecting the dark, fuzzy, mouse-sized body of a vole that our orange tiger cat Zeke had killed and left on the flagstones outside our door. Why wasn’t it moving? I asked. My dad, who loved nothing more than explaining things to inquisitive children, must have told me that it was dead and described what “dead” meant in terms he thought my two-year-old self might be able to understand.

I listened carefully, digested this. I looked up at him. “I’m gonna die in the spring,” I said.

I was two—I had no idea what I was talking about. I have no memory of this, except the memory of it through my dad’s eyes, when he told me about it many years later. I can only imagine how he felt hearing those words come out of my mouth. Full Article »

Pressed plants from long ago yield data on climate change

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Scope Correspondent

The primary act of social media—whether Twitter, tumblr, or Instagram—is virtual curation. Around the turn of the 20th century, though, the curation fad was literal: people roamed fields and forests to collect plant specimens and preserve them in plant libraries called herbaria. Now those old specimens are helping scientists reconstruct how trees have responded to shifts in the climate.

Scientists have recently gleaned data from New England herbarium specimens on historical timing of leaf-out—the time in spring when leaves unfurl, an important biological indicator of climate change. A team from Boston University used 1,599 plant specimens from 27 different tree species, dating from 1875 to 2008, to determine past leaf-out dates in New England. By combining herbarium specimen data with weather station data from the same time period, they found that trees leafed out 2.7 days earlier for each degree Celsius increase in April temperature. Full Article »

Kids want good answers to their questions

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Scope Correspondent

If you’ve ever been around a preschooler, you’re familiar with their incessant questions. It can be tempting to brush them off with a “Because I said so,” but new research shows that can hurt your credibility.

Five-year-olds and even three-year-olds can tell the difference between poor explanations and those that provide new information. Not only do they prefer the explanations with new information, they also use explanation quality to decide who is a good source of information later, according to research by Kathleen Corriveau and Katelyn Kurkul of Boston University. “It shows not only that they can tell that an explanation is kind of bogus, but they can also tell: this guy gives bogus explanations and I’m not going to listen to him in the future,” says Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the University of Neuchatel who was not involved in the study. Full Article »

The Case for Committed Quail Relationships

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Scope Correspondent

Hookup buddies or long-term partners? It’s a key question in 21st-century rom-coms, on college campuses, during awkward “we need to talk about where this is going” conversations – and also in the world of bird romance.

The personality of Japanese quail chicks changes depending on the kind of relationship formed between parents, according to a new study. And this effect isn’t a question of quail parenting strategies. Instead, it’s entirely prenatal.

Find the full story on NOVA Next.

Lost first languages leave impressions in the brain

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Scope Correspondent

Like a footprint in wet concrete, the first language a baby hears makes an impression that lasts for years, regardless of what follows. Later, children even as old as ten who are adopted or immigrate can completely forget their first language. But even if they do not consciously remember their mother tongue, their brains retain its traces, according to a study published this week in PNAS, led by Lara Pierce of McGill University. Full Article »

Slower Wind Speeds Spell Rapid Environmental Change

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Scope Correspondent

Winds of change are coming, and they’re bringing poised to upend entire ecosystems. Over the last 30 years, average surface wind speeds over areas in Europe, Central Asia, Eastern Asia and North America have slowed by about 10 percent. The potential effects of “global stilling” could affect land, air and aquatic systems worldwide.

New research published in Ecology illuminates what, exactly, global stilling could mean for the hunters and hunted of the insect world. For predators, stilling winds make it easier to chow down, says Brandon Barton, the University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoc researcher who authored the study.

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