SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
Drinking water that is contaminated with arsenic may lead to thickening of the heart’s main pumping chamber in young adults, a structural change that increases the risk for future heart problems, according to new research in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, an American Heart Association journal. “People drinking water from private wells, which are not regulated, need to … Read more
It’s a classic policy dispute: How much should the current generation invest in reducing carbon emissions for the benefit of future generations? A study published in Nature Communications helps answer this question by quantifying whether reducing carbon emissions – which will have global benefits in the future – also improves air quality now. Preventing many of … Read more
Researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), part of the University of Oxford, used an eight-year survey of UK households (Understanding Society, part of the UK Household Longitudinal Study) to study how long teenagers spent using social media on a normal school day and their corresponding life satisfaction ratings. This is the first large-scale and … Read more
Astronomers have just managed to take the first image of a black hole, and now the next challenge facing them is how to take even sharper images, so that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity can be tested. Radboud University astronomers, along with the European Space Agency (ESA) and others, are putting forward a concept for … Read more
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) today announced the selection of 38 South African-led projects that will use the MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape. These range from studies of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, to investigations of hydrogen gas, the fuel that makes up stars, half-way across the Universe. … Read more
Australian scientists have developed an innovative method using cores drilled from coral to produce a world first 400-year long seasonal record of El Niño events, a record that many in the field had described as impossible to extract. The record published today in Nature Geoscience detects different types of El Niño and shows the nature of El … Read more
Stanford psychologists have identified preferential activation to Pokémon characters in the brains of people who played Pokémon videogames extensively as kids. The findings, published online in the journal Nature Human Behavior, help shed light on two related mysteries about our visual system. “It’s been an open question in the field why we have brain regions … Read more
The Cambrian explosion was a crucial period of rapid evolution in complex animals that began roughly 540 million years ago. The trigger for this fundamental phase in the early history of animal life is a subject of ongoing biological debate. The study, published today in Nature Geoscience by scientists from the UK, China and Russia, … Read more
A new relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex – much smaller than the huge, ferocious dinonsaur made famous in countless books and films, including, yes, “Jurassic Park” – has been discovered and named by a Virginia Tech paleontologist and an international team of scientists. The newly named tyrannosauroid dinosaur – Suskityrannus hazelae – stood rougly 3 feet tall at the … Read more
Dotted across the sky in the constellation of Pictor (The Painter’s Easel) is the galaxy cluster highlighted here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: SPT-CL J0615-5746, or SPT0615 for short. First discovered by the South Pole Telescope less than a decade ago, SPT0615 is exceptional among the myriad clusters so far catalogued in our map of the Universe – it is the highest-redshift … Read more