Science

[:eu]This isn’t a photo of the Milky Way; it’s a deep, dark cave in New Zealand. And those blue things aren’t stars; they’re maggots. A chemical reaction in their Malpighian tubules—structures analogous to kidneys—makes their posteriors glow, much to the delight of more than 200,000 tourists who visit them every year. [:]

[:eu]Floating out by themselves in the Milky Way galaxy are perhaps a billion cold brown dwarfs, objects many times as massive as Jupiter but not big enough to ignite as a star. According to a new study, layers of their upper atmospheres sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and could host microbes…

[:eu]Students taking the most challenging math and science courses in their senior year were found to have performed progressively worse as they moved from elementary to middle to high school. [:]

[:es]Next month, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, a team of Dutch scientists will announce a catalog of 100 subducted plates, with information about their age, size, and related surface rock records, based on their own tomographic model and cross-checks with other published studies. [:]

[:es]Every day, space is filled with thousands of mysterious bursts of radio energy, enormous flashes that typically pack as much energy into a few milliseconds as the sun emits in all wavelengths in half a day. Nobody knows what causes these fast radio bursts (FRBs), but theories include such dramatic possibilities as colliding neutron stars…

[:en]Every summer, the “land down under” does a little dance: It slowly shifts 1 millimeter to the northwest and dips down 2 to 3 millimeters on its northwestern side. When winter comes, it shuffles back by the same amount, while its southeastern coast does the downward dipping. [:]

[:en]No chapter of Arctic history is more mysterious than the disappearance of these Norse settlements sometime in the 15th century. Theories for the colony’s failure have included everything from sinister Basque pirates to the Black Plague. [:]

[:en]Imagine spending your whole life seeing the world in black and white, and then seeing a vase of roses in full color for the first time. That’s kind of what it was like for the scientists who have taken the first multicolor images of cells using an electron microscope.[:]

[:en]Human hunters may be making birds smarter by inadvertently shooting those with smaller brains. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that hunting may be exerting a powerful evolutionary force on bird populations in Denmark, and likely wherever birds are hunted. But the work also raises a red flag for some researchers who…