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Smart News / Smart News Science

New Research

Computers Are Learning How To Teach Each Other New Skills

Why would you teach a computer how to teach other computers how to murder more efficiently?

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Cool Finds

Watch How Tuesday’s Tsunami Waves Moved From Chile All the Way to Australia

A computer model shows how the tsunami crossed the Pacific

New Research

Oxytocin Encourages People to Think More About the Group, Less About Themselves

It’s not that oxytocin makes people act in a good or bad way, just in a way that best serves the interests of their people

Coral

Cool Finds

Watch This Hypnotic Time Lapse Video of Coral

Corals are animals, rooted to the ocean floor but capable of some hypnotically beautiful movement, as this time lapse video shows

New Research

How the Zebra Got Its Stripes, According to Science

Rather than acting as camouflage or social signals, zebra stripes seem to deter biting flies

Problem solved?

New Research

There Are Too Many Pink Salmon in the Pacific

Pink salmon populations are booming, at the expense of other species

Snow in the Sierra Nevadas, January 18, 2014.

Trending Today

California’s Snowpack is 68 Percent Below Normal, Threatening Another Dry Summer

California’s snowpack is running low, a bad sign for a state plagued by drought

Cool Finds

Sometimes Scientists Just Need to Be Left Alone

Proponents for alone time—Isaac Newton, included—think silence can be a precondition for a great breakthrough

The projected tsunami propagation for last night's Chile earthquake.

New Research

It Is Now Technically Possible to Stop an Earthquake

Scientists have devised a way to reflect seismic waves

Some of the expressions the researchers identified, from top left to bottom right: happy, sad, fearful, angry, surprised, disgusted, happily surprised, happily disgusted, sadly fearful, sadly angry.

New Research

“Happy Disgust” Is a Newly Recognized Human Facial Expression

Basic emotions like happy, sad or angry blend in interesting ways on the landscape of the human face

New Research

Heat Increases the Risk of Early-Term Delivery

As temperatures rise, delivery rooms see a peak in early-term babies

New Research

Language Discrimination Goes Beyond Just Grammar

Even when candidates are all equally qualified, employers pick native speakers over those born abroad

"An illustration showing various ways that a water well (center) may become infected by typhoid fever bacteria."

Cool Finds

Science Rewrites the Death of America’s Shortest-Serving President

William Henry Harrison may have died of typhoid fever

Colorful archaea grow in in ponds.

New Research

How a Single Act of Evolution Nearly Wiped Out All Life on Earth

A single gene transfer event may have caused the Great Dying

New Research

A Virus—Possibly Spread by Pig Feed—Has Killed Millions of Piglets

The virus poses no threat to humans, but is deadly to piglets

New Research

Crows Understand Water Displacement Better Than Your Kid

Even Aesop knew that crows were so smart they understood how to get water to their beaks.

Researchers used the game Pardus to look at human organization.

New Research

Humans Playing Online Games Organize Themselves into Fractals

Players may be acting in a future, space-based world, but they still organize themselves into the fractals that humans have always fallen into

Cool Finds

You Can Watch the First Ever Operation to Transplant a 3D-Printed Skull Into a Person’s Head

The operation, which took place on a 22-year-old Dutch woman, was a success

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Cool Finds

There Are Hundreds of Examples of Mind-Controlling Parasites

Parasites that hijack other creatures’ minds are not at all rare

These Cheetos are not going bad any time soon don't worry.

Cool Finds

“Sell By” And “Best By” Dates on Food Are Basically Made Up—But Hard to Get Rid Of

Where do these dates even come from, and why do we have them?

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