As rising floodwaters assault Venice, there's now an 85% chance that 2019 will come in as second warmest year This anomaly map shows how temperatures departed last month from the long-term average. (Note: The temperature scale is in Celsius. Source: NASA GISS) Two U.S. agencies have now released their global warming report cards for last month, and they both show the same depressing grade: Of the 139 Octobers since 1880, last month was the second warmest on record. A third analysis,

Subsurface water on Jupiter's moon Europa is one place where humans plan to search for life. This artist's concept shows a massive plume of underground water erupting from the moon's surface. (Credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI) Jupiter’s moon Europa has an icy shell that conceals a liquid water ocean. Now, scientists have made the first direct measurement of water vapor in Europa’s atmosphere. It's the best evidence yet for a water plume erupting from the moon’s surface. […]

(Credit: Tomsickova Tatyana/Shutterstock) A new study takes a look at the rates of extramarital childbirth in Europe over the past 500 years. This includes children born as the result of adultery — and, spoiler, it's much lower than you probably think. The study, published in Current Biology, used genetic and historical data to estimate how often parents had children outside their primary relationship over the past 500 years in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The […]

Thick palls of smoke stream from Australia's sprawling bushfires in this view acquired by NASA's Aqua satellite on Nov. 11, 2019. The image consists of a natural-color view with an infrared overlay revealing areas of burning. (Source: NASA Worldview image processed by Pierre Markuse) So far, Australia's bushfires have scorched more than 4,000 square miles — an area greater than ten times the size of New York City. With hot and dry conditions predicted for weeks to come, there's not […]

Many people may be living life without a particular brain region - and not suffering any ill-effects. In a new paper in Neuron, neuroscientists Tali Weiss and colleagues discuss five women who appear to completely lack olfactory bulbs (OB). According to most neuroscience textbooks, no OB should mean no sense of smell, because the OB is believed to be a key relay point for olfactory signals. As Wikipedia puts it: The olfactory bulb transmits smell information from the nose to the b