Just before famed Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés pillaged the Aztec capital city Tenochtitlan in 1521, toppling one empire to make room for another, he was astounded by the immense size of its buildings and the wealth of its rulers. The city, he recalled in a letter to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was just as […]

Earth’s orbit along the Galactic Disc, is a long yet predictable journey that lasts for eons, but not without consequence, as Michael Rampino, a professor of biology at New York University recently observed. Rampino’s newest research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, believes that these infrequent rotations have coincided with the […]

G, C, A, T to be exact. Only a slight stretch of our DNA make the difference between us and our chimpanzee cousins. When embedding the bit of genetic information into mice, scientists found that the rodents’ brains grew significantly larger than usual. “It’s likely to be one of many DNA regions that’s critical for […]

Joshua Nowicki, a Michigan photographer, and his wife had a rather unexpected surprise this Valentine’s Day weekend when they planned a stroll along the shores of Lake Michigan. Blasts of arctic wind and snow forced them to postpone their walk until the next day, but in the end, the conditions actually proved somewhat favorable – […]

For over one third of a century, the AIDS pandemic has been a dismal specter for much of the world, claiming at least 22 million lives – perhaps a great deal more before it was formally classified in 1982. Another 36.1 million people are forced to live with stages of the disease on a daily […]

The sound of the ‘Dark Ages’ conjures up a medieval nightmare of violent battles, unruly mobs and heretics, a bleak past that wasn’t necessarily as ominous or in the past as movies like to portray it – after all, there are a number of barbaric and superstitious people still alive today. The term was first […]

As much as last summer’s Ebola outbreak was politicized after it hit American shores, it left a significant deal of damage at its epicenter in West Africa, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands. Although several treatments have been proposed, the question is whether such an event could happen again. As climate change brings […]

Freeze-dried probably doesn’t sound appetizing, neither does Tang, no matter how hard they try to market it as the Space Age drink. For all you might dream about traveling in space, food is probably one of the few things on your mind. Yet, for so many astronauts and cosmonauts, it seems inevitable that they would […]

It’s over 1,600 miles wide, a distant world at the far reaches of our solar system. The largest moon of Saturn, Titan and also the second-largest satellite in the solar system, dwarfed only by Earth’s moon. Aside from our planet, Titan is also the only place in the solar system known to contain liquids, containing […]

We typically think of the Jurassic period as the age of dinosaurs but they were certainly not alone – sharing their habitat with small rodentlike animals. Two new species have recently been uncovered in China — one of them was a tree-dweller with sharp, horn-like claws, while the other newly identified animal appeared to be […]