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Smart News / Smart News Science

Japan’s Newest Island Has Merged With Its Neighbor

Ongoing volcanic activity has caused Japan’s newest island to merge with its neighbor

Doctors Are Now Prescribing Books to Treat Depression

Reading to feel less isolated may be more than just a poetic thought

Tolkien’s Dwarves Would Have Needed 38 Mini-Nuclear Plants to Melt All That Gold So Quickly

Unless those dwarf furnaces were burning some sort of Middle-earth super fuel, in real life Smaug probably would have just eaten the dwarves

Jupiter's moon Io in orbit around the gas giant. Io is casting a dark shadow on Jupiter's atmosphere.

Did Astronomers Just Find the First Moon Outside Our Solar System?

The potential moon is half the size of Earth and in orbit around a planet four times bigger than Jupiter

Science Is Inching Closer to the Possibility of Erasing Bad Memories

Scientists began tinkering with memory in the late 1960s, but it’s only recently that research really began to hint that this might be possible

Coconut Crabs Eat Everything from Kittens to, Maybe, Amelia Earhart

According to one theory, Earhart did not drown in the Pacific but instead crashed on the remote Nikumaroro atoll, where she was eaten by coconut crabs

Sewage Water Reveals Community’s Illegal Drug Habits

Sewage analyses in the US found the highest levels of methamphetamines to date, but revealed that cocaine use in the US seems on par with that in Europe

Can You Fry Things in Space?

Can the good old American tradition of caking foods in grease continue in the vast recesses of space?

Hadza hunter-gatherers on the hunt for dinner.

Animals And Humans Use Similar Tactics to Find Food

The authors think this particular foraging method may have evolved in early humans and stuck around through the eons due to its effectiveness

Cool Finds

Some Spiders Eat Salads

Most people think of spiders as terrifying carnivores, laying in wait to trap their prey. That’s mostly true, but sometimes spiders eat other things too

Measured snowfall from this past weekend.

Here Are Your Odds of Getting a White Christmas

If nothing else, it gives you an excuse to sit inside all day drinking hot chocolate

We’ve Done So Well by Chesapeake Oysters, We Can Start Eating Them Again

Perhaps this time we can keep ourselves from eating them to oblivion

Campylaspis costata, a species of crawfish recently discovered in Norway.

Look Closely, And You Can Find New Species—Even in Well-Explored Countries Like Norway

Determination is all that’s needed to discover new species

A side-by-side comparison of cities’ sizes.

Everything’s Bigger in America, Especially Urban Sprawl

Eight other cities (total population: 100 million) fit into the footprint of Atlanta (population: 5 million)

This 200 Million-Year-Old Plant Species Helps Explain the Origin of All Flowers

Of the 300,000 flowering plants known today, Amborella is the only one that directly traces back to the common ancestor of them all

The Best of the British Medical Journal’s Goofy Christmas Papers

This year, for example, we learned about just how much James Bond actually drank. Last year we learned just why Rudolph’s nose was red

The Terrible Twos Are Actually the Worst

Toddlers are brats. It’s science

A 900 year-old skull from Peru, whose former owner underwent brain surgery.

1,000 Years Ago, Patients Survived Brain Surgery, But They Had To Live With Huge Holes in Their Heads

The practice finally came to an end when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century and decided to make it illegal

The London Zoo’s Brian Zimmerman looks for a cichlid in Madagascar.

Doomed Species May Be Saved—A Global Search Locates a Female

With this little fish facing down extinction, a global hunt turned up a few remaining wild individuals

How the Swine Flu Vaccine Provides Insight Into Narcolepsy

In 2009, doctors noticed that children who got a particular strain of swine flu vaccine were suddenly much more likely to develop narcolepsy

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