This takes cicada love to a whole new level.
Watch David Rothenberg serenade cicadas with his clarinet and expertly pick out the individual calls of the buzzing bugs.
“This could be a day, I thought, when all the inhabitants of Earth, in unison, could issue a full-throated, cosmic shout-out and smile a big one for the cameras from far, far away.”
-On July 19, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will snap a picture of Earth from a billion miles away. Carolyn Porco, the leader of Cassini’s imaging team, gives an inside look at the project.
When things go wrong in the lab.
Watch what happens when this chemistry teacher’s experiment doesn’t quite go according to plan.
“There were total massacres…People were tortured, burned, shot, stabbed by soldiers. They were exterminating entire communities. You can’t say that’s not genocide.”
-Jose Cortez, an Ixil civil war survivor who runs a small NGO that aids fellow survivors, on the ongoing genocide trial in Guatemala.
Using forensic science, investigators have found compelling evidence that thousands of innocent indigenous Ixil Mayans were the target of extermination in Guatemala during the 1980s, a discovery that is directly affecting the genocide trial of former leader Efrain Rios Montt.
Get ready for the cicada invasion.
Sometime around Memorial Day, in the declining hours of daylight, swarms of male cicadas will rise up en masse from the soil, where they’ve lived for 17 years sucking on plant roots underground. They’ll emerge as nymphs, and begin shedding their exoskeleten in a process called “molting,” revealing wings and an adult body. Then partly flying, partly walking, they’ll start a mad dash up houses and trees to avoid predators. Once safe in the treetops, they’ll spend the remaining months of their lives engaged in a chorus of mating calls, searching for a partner to help continue their gene pool. The females will follow shortly.
In his upcoming solo album, “Dark Matter,” Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA rhymes about the Big Bang. The legendary rapper performed his new material at Bronx Compass High School, where he hopes to pique students’ interest in science by introducing hip-hop to the lesson plan.
Above, GZA gives a sneak peek to his album. Think you could out-rap him? Submit your own science rap here for a chance to win a shout-out from the legend.
New findings strongly indicate that scientists have found the Holy Grail of physics, the Higgs boson, an elusive particle believed to be responsible for giving mass to matter. If discovered and proven, Higgs could change the way we understand the origins of the universe.
What if we found extraterrestrial life on another planet…but it actually originated on Earth?
The first baby has been cured of HIV, researchers announced Sunday. The case was publicly unveiled at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
The infant, who is now two and a half years old, was born to a “high-risk” mother in Mississippi. The mother was not diagnosed with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) until delivery, and therefore did not receive the typical prenatal treatment for the disease that could have prevented transmission to the baby.
Confirmation of the baby’s HIV status came from Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University. Go here for the conversation with Dr. Luzuriaga about her team’s research.
