Josh Sokol

Scope Correspondent
joshua.d.sokol@gmail.com

Blinking into Existence

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Scope Correspondent

It is perhaps the raw and reckless potency of antimatter that so excites us. For Star Trek writers and hack fiction authors alike, the very name, anti-matter, seems less about what it is and more about what it does. Be careless enough to put it together with normal matter and it will cancel out, negate. Even the clinical term for that process is suggestive: it will “annihilate.” And it will do so spectacularly, in a flash of gamma rays. Kaboom. Full Article »

Oh, the weather on Mars was frightful

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Scope Correspondent

Between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago, water carved valleys into the Red Planet’s surface. But as planetary scientists try to understand the ancient Martian climate that caused this erosion, the answers from different scientific approaches don’t add up. Read the full story on NOVA Next.

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.

The Feminist Beginnings of Big Bio at MIT

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Scope Correspondent

Descriptions of the MIT elective Reproductive Biology, devised in the late 1980s as an explicitly feminist course, were frank. The upstart elective aimed to cover the discoveries “which affect the ability of the human race to influence its own reproduction.” But this course went on to spawn something bigger, something that spoke to seismic changes in twentieth-century science: the first required biology course at MIT.

Biology, long dismissed as a “soft” science, was on the rise. “The first clonings of human disease genes were happening,” says MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, now emeritus. “And I thought, wow! Every young person is going to have to learn genetics,” she says. “This is going to become required human knowledge.” Full Article »

From Lazy Bees to Busy Bees

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Scope Correspondent

The Miami Heat lost basketball superstar Lebron James this past summer. How will they cope? “We’ll just keep the ball rolling,” said bench player Norris Cole.

In sports, other players must “step up” when the stars are absent. In honeybee hives, that cliché isn’t far from the truth. The disappearance of all-stars makes laid-back bees work harder for the good of the colony, according to a new research paper. Full Article »

Super-cold, Super-close Brown Dwarf May Have Icy Clouds

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Scope Correspondent

Brown dwarf W0855 was already special. A few times the size of Jupiter and super-cold, it’s halfway between a star and free-floating planet. Now ice clouds have been tentatively found in its atmosphere—which would mark the first time they’ve ever been seen on an extrasolar world…

This story appears in full on NOVA Next.