Science

[:es]Most geodes—hollow, crystal-lined rocks—can fit in the palm of your hand. But the giant Pulpí Geode, which is about half the size of a small bedroom, fills part of an abandoned mine in southeastern Spain. Now, researchers have analyzed some of its crystals to figure out its age—and how this real-life Fortress of Solitude came…

[:es]Brain scientists can watch neurons fire and communicate. They can map how brain regions light up during sensation, decision-making, and speech. What they can’t explain is how all this activity gives rise to consciousness. Theories abound, but their advocates often talk past each other and interpret the same set of data differently. Now, the Templeton…

[:es]Two years ago, a barely submerged volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands released giant bubbles of gas, some of which were broader than the world’s largest humanmade dome, the 310-meter-wide National Stadium in Singapore, researchers reported today in Nature Geoscience.[:]

[:es]A project to monitor every aspect of a fast-shrinking glacier could hold an answer to an urgent question: How fast will seas rise?[:]

[:es]In the bowels of Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, Jasmina Wiemann yanks open a drawer in a floor-to-ceiling specimen cabinet. She lifts out a wickedly sharp, sickle-shaped dinosaur claw, black as coal. “This is the type specimen of Deinonychus—the basis for the Velociraptor in the Jurassic Park movies,” she says. The black color…

[:es]Just weeks after the discovery of the second-ever comet from outside of our solar system (the first was the cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua), astronomers have detected gas emitted from its surface—the first hint of what an interstellar traveler is made of.[:]

[:es]Archaeologists and architects alike have long wondered why 15th century Incans built the grand citadel of Machu Picchu where they did, high in the remote Andes atop a narrow ridge in what is now Peru. One simple answer, researchers now suggest, is that that’s where building materials for the site—large amounts of already fractured rock—were…

[:es]How many fish really appear in the photo collage above? The answer bears on whether a study about lionfish social behavior, published in Biology Letters in 2014, was fabricated—and whether Oona Lönnstedt, a marine biologist formerly at Uppsala University (UU) in Sweden who made up data in a 2016 Science paper, committed an earlier fraud.…

[:es]The age of quantum computing may have begun not with a flashy press conference but with an internet leak. According to a paper posted briefly–and presumably mistakenly–to a lab site, physicists at Google have used a quantum computer to perform a calculation that would overwhelm the world’s best conventional supercomputer. Although the specific computation has…