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In a new book, University of North Carolina-Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks says that racism in science is alive and well. This stands in sharp contrast to creationist thinking, Marks says, which is, like racism, decidedly evident in our society but most certainly not welcome in science. In Is Science Racist?, Marks writes: "If you espouse creationist ideas in science, you are branded as an ideologue, as a close-minded pseudo-scientist who is unable to adopt a modern perspective, and who consequently has no place in the community of scholars. But if you espouse racist ideas in science,

Not all smiles are created equal. tonipostius via Flickr How much teeth should you show when you smile? How wide should your grin be, and what if it’s crooked? Using a variety of computer-animated faces, researchers from the University of Minnesota have done their best to isolate the traits of a winning smile. At first glance, this may seem like a laughing matter. But for people with paralysis or other medical conditions, being physically unable to smile can cause communication problems, anxiety, and depression. The new study, published today in PLOS One, could help doctors who perform facial

Identifying the various parts of a baseplate compass A: Straight Edge B: Direction-of-Travel Arrow C: Bearing Guide D: Rotating Housing E: Orienting Arrow F: Magnetic Needle Dan Saelinger This story originally appeared on fieldandstream.com. In the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, as you may remember, Johnny Depp’s character, Capt. Jack Sparrow, navigates with a magic compass whose needle points toward the object of the heart’s desire. Orienteering differs in that a topo map has contour lines in place of the galaxy imprinted on Sparrow’s compass, and the needle on a compass points to the magnet

In the future, when a couple wants to reproduce, “they will not make a baby in a bed or in the backseat or a car, or under a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign,” says Henry Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School. Instead, they will go to a clinic. Using stem cells from the couple’s skin or other non-reproductive organs, scientists will be able to make eggs and sperm, which will be combined into embryos. “Each of those embryos will have its own gene sequence,” Greely says. “The parents will be asked: ‘What do you want to know about these embryos?’ And they’

One of the latest victims of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian regime in Turkey isn’t a journalist, or dissident academic, but the concept of evolution. His government’s decision to erase Darwin’s idea—the bedrock of biology—from the high school curriculum will take effect in September (if a lawsuit against the move fails). Classes on evolution will, for now, still be taught at the university level. This is the apparent apotheosis of a recent trend to Islamize secular education in Turkey. References to the Muslim faith in the country’s high school curriculum have been on the rise since 2012

Scientists are about to get an up-close and personal look at Jupiter's most famous landmark, the Great Red Spot. NASA's Juno spacecraft will be directly over the spot shortly after 10 p.m. ET on Monday, July 10, about 5,600 miles above the gas giant's cloud tops. That's closer than any spacecraft has been before. The spot is actually a giant storm that has been blowing on Jupiter for centuries. It's huge, larger than the Earth in diameter. "It's lasted a really long time," says Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and principal scientist for NASA's Juno mission to Ju

Who among us has not walked into a Target mentally chanting something like “Eggs, shaving cream, toothpaste, toilet paper” only to get home and realize we’ve forgotten the toothpaste? Looks like we’re using mouthwash tonight! If you’ve got a lengthy to-do list, and you’re not ready to commit to bullet journaling or whatever to keep track of it all, Gary Small, the director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, has a little trick to hold it all in your head: Turn the words into a story. He demonstrated this trick on Saturday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is

What would happen if your brain was split in two? In this week's Invisibilia podcast and show, host Hanna Rosin meets a woman named Karen with "alien hand syndrome." After surgery to treat her epilepsy severed the connection between the two halves of her brain, Karen's left hand took on a mind of its own, acting against her will to undress or even to slap her. Amazing, to be sure. But what may be even more amazing is that most people who have split-brain surgery don't notice anything different at all. But there's more to the story than that. In the 1960s, a young neuroscientist named Michael G

When Francisco Mojica was 25, he supported himself by tracking bacteria in the Mediterranean off the coast of a tourist haven in southeastern Spain. At the time, he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Alicante, where he focused on a much stranger microorganism than those he was searching for in the ocean: Haloferax mediterranei, a single-celled creature that thrives in water so salty it kills almost everything else. “Even sea water is not salty enough for them,” he says. To understand this peculiar creature, Mojica, his advisor, and another graduate student were painstakingly sequenc

The sea is miraculous. Just the sight of the seemingly boundless body of water is humbling for many. And in the 18th century, the ocean was often regarded as a panacea, with doctors prescribing drinking a pint of sea water to cure everything from leprosy to heatstroke to depression. While modern medicine has yet to support ocean water as a cure-all, there are certainly some major benefits to spending time by the seaside — whether you’re lucky enough to live there or are just visiting. A breath of fresh ocean air might be medicinal. Research has found that patients with cystic fibrosis experie

Before human beings wrote books or did math or composed music, we made leather. There is evidence hunter-gatherers were wearing clothes crafted from animal skins hundreds of thousands of years ago, while in 2010 archaeologists digging in Armenia found what they believed to be the world’s oldest leather shoe, dating back to 3,500 B.C. (It was about a women’s size 7.) For a species sadly bereft of protective fur, being able to turn the skin of cows or sheep or pigs into clothing with the help of curing and tanning would have been a lifesaving advance, just like other vital discoveries Homo sapie

More than a decade ago, Judy Van de Water, a neuroimmunologist, decided to follow her instincts and research a condition she knew nothing about. Van de Water, now a lead scientist at the University of California Davis MIND Institute—an international research center for neurodevelopmental disorders—had spent her career studying the immune system. In 2000, she stumbled upon a compelling area of research: the immunobiology of autism. Through studies on mice, rats and rhesus macaques and, eventually, retrospective and prospective analyses of children diagnosed with autism and their mothers, Van de

Something had to go to make room for the turtles. Pixabay Death is a part of life. Things have to die so other things can be born et cetera et cetera circle of life hakuna matata. It’s hard to get that broken up about some giant aquatic sloths that no longer roam the oceans in search of sea grass. We never experienced their majestic front crawl, so we don’t really care how or when they died. Almost all of the species that have ever existed are now extinct—why should swimming sloths be any more important than the rest? Apart from the fact that, come on they’re giant swimming sloths, there’s one

Do you really love your job? Are you truly engaged in your work? If you are able to answer “yes” to both questions, you’re in the minority. Less than 30% of millennials responding to a 2016 Gallup survey indicated they felt engaged at work and 16% even said they were actively disengaged. Now, to improve your feelings about work, it might require some changes — like a promotion or pay bump — or even a big job switch, especially early in your career. But the truth for at least some is that sometimes the problem is not the job but your own attitudes, and being more satisfied must start with you.

Imagine if every animal and plant on the planet collapsed into a single population each, says ecologist Gerardo Ceballos. If lions disappeared except from one small corner of Kenya, the prey they keep in check would run amok everywhere else. If sparrows were no more except in one Dutch forest, the seeds that sparrows disperse would stay in place everywhere else. If honeybees became isolated to one American meadow, the flowers that they pollinate would fail to reproduce everywhere else. None of those species would be extinct per se, “but we’d still be in very bad shape,” says Ceballos. He uses

If you don’t know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know from what gets lost during brain injuries. Under happier circumstances, they glimpse the functioning of visual perception from how it breaks down in optical illusions. For instance, the 3-D Escher-like illusions created by Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University exploit our brain’s tendency to see all angles as right angles. Some of the most dramatic illusions involve apparent motion—these appear to spin, shimmer, or shimmy even though they’re comple

For at least six of the past 10 years, Ali Saed, a farmer, grew no crops. The rain in his little corner of northern Iraq was too meager, as was the flow of a nearby irrigation canal. He was only a few months away from ditching agriculture for good when he reached out to a distant relative, a government scientist in Baghdad. Saed was told some farmers had tapped groundwater stores, and he wondered if he might be able to do the same. By sizing up satellite images of the surrounding fields, the cousin identified a nearby dip layered with porous rock through which rainwater might once have seeped.

Scientists look around the universe and see amazing structure. There are objects and processes of fantastic complexity. Every action in our universe follows exact laws of nature that are perfectly expressed in a mathematical language. These laws of nature appear fine-tuned to bring about life, and in particular, intelligent life. What exactly are these laws of nature and how do we find them? The universe is so structured and orderly that we compare it to the most complicated and exact contraptions of the age. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the universe was compared to a perfectly working cloc

Sometimes lightning doesn't go down. photograph by Elka Liot and Grégory Moulard Muscapix Everyone loves a lightning show: big bolts of electricity heading to Earth. But there’s an entire display above those billowing masses that you are probably missing. In 2001, researchers scanning the sky with a low-light camera at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory noticed something bizarre: Lightning exploding from a cloud’s top and heading straight for space. The trajectory was baffling. Thunderbolts form when a negative electrical charge—gathered from an incoming storm—builds up near the bottom of a clo

Science relies on the careful collection and analysis of facts. Science also benefits from human judgment, but that intuition isn't necessarily reliable. A study finds that scientists did a poor job forecasting whether a successful experiment would work on a second try. That matters, because scientists can waste a lot of time if they read the results from another lab and eagerly chase after bum leads. "There are lots of different candidates for drugs you might develop or different for research programs you might want to invest in," says Jonathan Kimmelman, an associate professor of biomedical

Sorry, not those aliens. A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution points to the Hawaiian Islands as a global hotspot for "established alien species," or invasive breeds of plants, animals, and insects. So although when we picture the Big Island we may conjure its iconic giant sea turtles and surfing dolphins, it's actually teeming with life introduced by humans. Hundreds of feral pigs, goats, donkeys and sheep run free on land, while cute-but-destructive guppies are pervasive beneath the waves. Guppies Guppies are now global invasive species. Flickr Creative Commons The study, condu

It looked like many different animals and, at the same time, like no other animal at all. From afar, you might think it was a large, humpless camel. Tall, stout legs ending in rhino feet carried a body weight potentially equal to that of a small car. Its neck stretched like a giraffe’s before giving way to a face resembling a saiga antelope’s. From this face extended a fleshy protuberance, similar to a mini elephant trunk or a tapir’s proboscis. When Charles Darwin first found its fossils in southern Patagonia during his Beagle voyage, he was baffled. He sent specimens to Richard Owen, an Engl

Lara Stolman's Swim Team is long enough to break and warm your heart in equal measure — which is about what you'd expect from a documentary about teenagers with autism who are training to compete in the Special Olympics. To its enormous credit, Swim Team is a very specific film that doesn't engage with the often acrimonious and ill-informed debates about what causes autism. Nor does Stolman line up experts to enlighten us on the subject of a condition about which so little is known for certain. By keeping a tight focus on three very different teenaged boys on the spectrum and their families, h

Laura met George in the pages of Reader’s Digest. In just a couple of column inches, she read an abridged version of his biography and was instantly intrigued. In the 1960s, apparently, egotistical scientist George Price discovered an equation that explained the evolution of altruism, then overnight turned into an extreme altruist, giving away everything up to and including his life.  A theatre director, Laura Farnworth recognized the dramatic potential of the story. It was a tragedy of Greek proportions—the revelation of his own equation forcing Price to look back on his selfish life and mend

A massive, dying star that astronomers thought would explode has instead quietly collapsed into a black hole. The event, which NASA calls a “massive fail,” could be a more common pattern for giant stars than astronomers previously suspected. The star, referred to as N6946-BH1, lived in a galaxy 22 million light years away. Referred to as the “Fireworks Galaxy” for the frequent supernovae—explosions of stars—known to happen there, the star cluster has held NASA’s attention for several years. About eight years ago, N6946-BH1 started to weaken. A few years later, the telescopes aimed in its direc

John Bruno is a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. When summer arrives, my friends and family inevitably roll their eyes when I tell them I’m packing for my fieldwork in the Caribbean. They picture a book and a white-sand beach. I do get a tan. But it’s no vacation. I study ocean ecosystems. The work is chronically underfunded, so food and housing is basic or worse. When we’re in Belize monitoring the health of coral reefs, about half the nights we sleep under the stars on a dock. When I can afford a roach- and gecko-infested room, it’s often so rustic that it’s

Have you ever been told that you have “period brain”? You know, the condition that arrives, say, once a month for four to seven days, and renders you completely aloof and irrational because that’s apparently what being a menstruating person does to you. This sexist nonsense and drivel continues to be passed down from generation to generation, girlfriend to girlfriend — as even the scientist who has officially debunked it noted. The idea that women literally cannot think straight while menstruating isn’t so much a myth perpetuated by men, but one we continue to saddle ourselves with. “As a spe