Say What?
- Health & Medicine
Clean inside those bagpipes — and trumpets and clarinets
Bagpipes’ moist interiors may be the perfect breeding ground for yeasts and molds.
- Physics
Flaming fuel on water creates ‘blue whirl’ that burns clean
Scientists found a way to burn fuel on water that leaves little soot behind.
- Planetary Science
Earth has a tiny tagalong, and no, it’s not a moon
Asteroid 2016 HO3 is a quasisatellite of Earth — orbiting the sun while never wandering far from our planet.
- Oceans
The Arctic Ocean is about to get spicier
Variations in the saltiness and temperature of seawater of the same density, called spiciness, could increase as the Arctic Ocean warms.
- Environment
Dome effect leaves Chinese megacities under thick haze
Airborne black carbon lowers an atmospheric boundary, trapping pollution around major cities and worsening air quality, researchers propose.
- Astronomy
Black hole smashup generated yottawatts of power
For a split second, LIGO’s black hole collision generated 36 septillion yottawatts of power, or 50 times the power from all the stars in the universe.
- Astronomy
Clues left at a galactic hit-and-run
Scientists may have discovered a dwarf galaxy that triggered a “galaxy quake” when it buzzed by the Milky Way a few hundred million years ago.
- Astronomy
Super-Earths, meet superpuffs, a lighter weight class of planet
Superpuffs are underweight, oversized planets that formed in outskirts of star systems before cuddling up close to their sun.
- Animals
For a female mosquito, the wrong guy can mean no babies
Male Asian tiger mosquitoes leave female yellow fever mosquitoes uninterested in mating with their own species, a process known as “satyrization.”
- Health & Medicine
‘Vomiting device’ sounds gross but it helps study infections
Scientists created a “vomiting device” to study how norovirus spreads through the air.
- Health & Medicine
The five basic tastes have sixth sibling: oleogustus
Scientists dub the taste of fat oleogustus.
- Genetics
Melonomics: Sounds like a cancer, smells like a melon
The project that published the first melon genome dubbed itself melonomics.
