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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Vera Kistiakowsky was not pleased. It was February 3, 1971, and the MIT nuclear physicist was sitting in the audience at the American Physical Society’s first session on women in physics. The problem wasn’t the session itself, but, as she put it, “all these idiots in the audience responding.”

Case in point: Valentine Telegdi, a Hungarian physicist at the University of Chicago, said with a big smile on his face, “If I had been married to Pierre Curie, I would have been Madame Curie.”

Kistiakowsky recalls that it “made me want to get up and scream, but I didn’t.” Instead she decided to form a Committee on Women in Physics, “so I could rub the facts in.” Full Article »

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet that has since been repeatedly and widely discredited, claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism. No such thing is true. It later came to light that Wakefield had violated ethics in many ways and deliberately lied about the results, and The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.

Unfortunately, much damage was already done, as thousands of parents had decided not to vaccinate their children. In recent years, measles epidemics have been making a comeback, especially in Europe, where the MMR autism scare was greatest. In 2011 alone, measles outbreaks in Europe sickened 26,000 people and killed nine.

The irony of all this is that the MMR vaccine has been preventing autism all along, by protecting pregnant women from rubella. Full Article »

Our Milky Way galaxy is vast—100,000 light-years across—but even the Milky Way is part of something larger. As astronomers zoom out to larger and larger scales, they see galaxies bunching up into clusters and these clusters into superclusters.

Astronomers have recently mapped our home supercluster and found that it is five times larger than previously thought. The Milky Way is just one peripheral blip out of 100,000 galaxies. A team led by Brent Tully at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu used a new method to define this supercluster, which they named Laniakea, meaning “immeasurable heaven” in Hawaiian. Laniakea is 500 million light-years across. If the supercluster were as tall as a three-story house, the entire Milky Way would fit inside the head of a pin. Full Article »

It’s only a single cell, but the avian malaria parasite is able to quickly detect when a mosquito bites its host and respond by reproducing faster, according to a new study.

This is part of the parasites’ strategy for surviving seasons with no mosquitoes. The parasites “remain dormant, like bears during the winter,” said Dr. Sylvain Gandon, an evolutionary epidemiologist at Université de Montpellier and an author of the study. “Do nothing, wait for better times. And it’s a problem for the parasites to know when the better times are coming.” The avian malaria parasite shares this survival challenge with human malaria parasites that live in places with a mosquito-free dry season.

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