Though the largest telescopes are controlled by governments, a large part of the time new discoveries are made by amateur astronomers. "Amateur" is a negative word now but at the turn of the 20th century it wasn't. Sherlock Holmes was an amateur detective because he did not have to do it as a job, he was not a blue collar laborer the way the police force was regarded in the 1800s, he was more educated in detective work by not having that occupation and that is why he was better.

While you won't see a lot of fruit fly studies done by amateurs, in other fields citizen science provides a lot of data, and a new paper argues they should be treated as co-authors in journal articles.

“The history of the bow and arrow is the history of mankind,” said Fred Bear.

If you want to get a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving, you don't need to spend $120 for something that calls itself Heritage, you can honor your actual heritage and go get one the way your ancestors did. With a bow and arrow.

Since that time, a lot of has improved about archery. Though guns haven't changed much in the last 100 years, archery has gone through a technological renaissance. Entire science conference presentations are devoted to it, and that happened this weekend at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Seattle.


Credit: INSEP, France.

"Many people have dogs. We have stem cells," says Cedars-Sinai Hospital lab manager Loren Ornelas-Menendez about why they will be working on Thanksgiving, hand-feeding a special formula to their charges and making sure they stay at just the right temperature. Like they do every day, 365 days a year.

This is not just any lab, it houses stem cells derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, and a catalog of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Crohn's disease.

Many people feel anxious about the prospect of their death. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that death anxiety is universal and that this anxiety bounds and organizes human existence. But do we also suffer from birth anxiety? Perhaps. After all, we are all beings that are born as well as beings that die.

Whereas philosophers have said a lot about our anxiety about death, they have said little about birth anxiety. This is part-and-parcel of the broader neglect of birth in the Western philosophical tradition. The guiding thought has been that ‘all men are mortal’ (‘men’ in the sense of ‘human beings’) rather than ‘all human beings are mortal and natal’.

While they last, gamma-ray bursts outshine stars and even galactic quasars. They are the most energetic phenomenon known to humankind, resulting from the formation of neutron stars or black holes as dying stars collapse. They are triggered by outflows of plasma ejected near the speed of light. 

They usually display energies in the region of tens of giga-electron-volts but why not even greater? Indeed, it is no longer speculation, a gamma-ray burst in the region of a tera-electron-volt has been detected. Which means these energies might actually be common.

The evolution of the snake body has captivated researchers for a long time because it represents one of the most dramatic examples of the vertebrate body's ability to adapt. A limited fossil record has obscured our understanding of their early evolution but now an ancient legged snake, called Najash has shed light on the origin of the slithering reptiles.


The fossil analyses reveal they possessed hind legs during the first 70 million years of their evolution, and provide details about how the flexible skull of snakes evolved from their lizard ancestors.

Scientists performed high-resolution (CT) scanning and light microscopy of preserved skulls of Najash to reveal substantial new anatomical data on the early evolution of snakes.