houstory: Blogs

Could artificial mini glaciers bring water to the driest, coldest places on Earth?

Glaciers are not just spectacular indicators of climate change as they shrink and disappear due to global warming. They are also, for many communities, an irreplaceable source of fresh water. During the melting season in summer, a portion of mountain glacier surface releases water that is essential to the ecosystem in the valleys below, supplying vast cities – and industries – in places like South America and India. But this meltwater is also essential to many remote rural communities for drin...

Strange earthquakes in South Carolina traced to man-made lake

A series of small earthquakes northwest of Columbia, South Carolina, are caused by a man-made lake built more than 40 years ago, according to geologists. The tiny temblors — magnitude 2.0 and less — are jangling nerves near South Carolina's Lake Monticello, according to The State newspaper, but the tremors are not unprecedented. The reservoir set off a series of minor earthquakes when it was first filled in the late 1970s. Another small swarm occurred between 1996 and 1999. Since Oct. 25, there...

The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark matter, might be tugging gravitationally on these galaxies. Since then, researchers have confirmed that this mysterious material can be found throughout the cosmos, and that it is six times more abundant than the normal matter that makes...

NASA needs a new telescope, ASAP, to find Earth's twin

If Earth has a twin somewhere out there, NASA should find it. That's the takeaway from a once-in-a-decade report that sets the priorities for astronomy over the next decade. In order to find such Earth-like exoplanets, NASA should build a big, fancy new space telescope, the report states. Every 10 years, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine advise government agencies, such as NASA and the National Science Foundation, as to what research objectives astronomers should pr...

Antiviral pill cuts COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by 89%, Pfizer says

Pfizer plans to submit the data to the FDA for emergency approval "as soon as possible" and has stopped enrolling for its clinical trial following strong positive results. A new COVID-19 pill cuts the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% when taken within three days of symptom onset, Pfizer recently announced. The antiviral pill, PAXLOVID, was given in a placebo-controlled clinical trial to people with COVID-19 who were at high risk of developing severe disease. The pill works by inhibitin...

Baleen whales eat three times more than scientists once thought

Earth's largest animals may eat even more gargantuan amounts of food than scientists thought, a new study reveals. Baleen whales — which capture krill, fish, zooplankton and squid by filtering seawater through their special structures in their mouths — may consume up to three times more prey than previously estimated, the study found. The discovery could rattle our understanding of how nutrients flow through ocean food webs. After feeding deep underwater, the whales swim upward to breathe an...

240,000-year-old 'Child of Darkness' human ancestor discovered in narrow cave passageway

Deep within South Africa's Rising Star cave system, in a dark passageway barely 6 inches (15 centimeters) wide, scientists have discovered the fragmented skull of a Homo naledi child they're calling "Leti." How the little skull ended up in such a remote part of the cave is a mystery, though the discoverers suspect it could be evidence of an intentional burial. "Leti," short for "Letimela," or "Lost One" in the Setswana language of South Africa, probably lived between 335,000 and 241,000 years a...

The 6 most gruesome grave robberies

The grave is supposed to be a final resting place. Sometimes, though, the postmortem peace is shattered and a corpse disturbed. Graves have been robbed for reasons ranging from ransom to cannibalism, though the most common reason throughout history has probably been the profit motive. Throughout the 1800s, body snatchers in the United States and England sold corpses to anatomists for medical dissections. The practitioners of this unsavory art came to be known as "resurrectionists." Read on for ...

Nuclear-powered US submarine collided with a hidden underwater mountain, Navy reveals

A nuclear-powered U.S. submarine that ran aground in the South China Sea last month collided with an uncharted seamount, according to a U.S. Navy investigation. The USS Connecticut, a Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine, collided with an unknown object in international waters on Oct. 2, causing minor to moderate injuries to 11 crewmembers, NPR reported. The damaged submarine surfaced and made it to a port in Guam unassisted. The Navy hasn't disclosed the full extent of the damage, and all the N...

What happens when a baby takes its first breath?

Within seconds of birth, a baby takes in its own oxygen for the first time. For that to happen, their tiny lungs and circulatory system have to transform in a matter of seconds. So how does a tiny human manage to take what could be the most challenging breath of its life just seconds after birth? First, it helps to understand how the circulatory system — specifically, the lungs and heart — work in utero. The lungs don't provide oxygen to the fetus during gestation. Instead, they are partially...