Educational Science

Breast vs. Bottle: Weighing Infant-Feeding Options

Deciding the best way to feed a new baby is a very personal choice for a woman. Whether she chooses to breast-feed or use formula, feeding time is an important opportunity for a mother and baby to form a close bond with one another. Health professionals consider breast-feeding to be...

Life on Earth May Have Started with a Cosmic Splash

A new study bolsters the theory that the chemical origins of life on Earth were midwifed by meteorites that delivered essential building blocks from space. Meteorites slamming into warm, small ponds on the planet's rising land surfaces more than 4 billion years ago could have delivered those building blocks into...

Particles split in the hot belly of a lightning bolt. Radioactive particles decay in the afterglow. Gamma rays rain down to Earth. Teruaki Enoto, a physicist at Kyoto University in Japan, proved for the first time, in a paper published Nov. 23, that lightning bolts work as natural particle accelerators....

Don't Blink: Striking Image Shows Bullet in Man's Eye Socket

A striking new image shows a bullet lodged in a man's eye socket. The 45-year-old man went to the emergency room after he was shot with a 0.22 caliber pistol, according to a new report of the case, published today (Nov. 30) in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology. The bullet went...

Why Don't Hippos Get Cholera?

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The short answer is that cholera has evolved to infect humans, not hippos. Cholera is a disease caused by a curved rod-shaped bacterium called Vibrio cholerae. The disease is...

First Cat in Space to Receive a Proper Memorial

When it comes to animals that heroically blasted off into space during the space race, names like Laika the dog or Ham the chimpanzee are probably the first that come to mind. But one spacefaring feline who helped to pave the way for humans to go to space has gone...

Gay Lions? Not Quite

A photograph of two male lions seemingly in an amorous embrace has some humans clutching their pearls. After the release of the photograph, taken in August at Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, Ezekiel Mutua, the chief executive of the Kenya Film Classification Board, blamed humans (or maybe demons) for the...

What in the World? Flat-Earthers Gather at First Conference

A conference aimed at disputing the idea that the world is round just wrapped up in North Carolina. The first-ever 2017 Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) was held in Raleigh on Nov. 9 and 10, featuring some of the big names in round-Earth denial. Among the speakers were Darryle Marble,...

Photos: Is ice age cat mummy a lion or a lynx?

Incredible find (Image credit: Courtesy of Anastasia Koryakina)A man hunting for mammoth tusks in Eastern Siberia came across an unexpected find in the permafrost: the mummy of a cat that lived during the last ice age. It's not yet clear whether the ancient kitty is a cave lion or a...

Here's Why a Man's Arm Looks Like Popeye's

He might not be a sailor or have a girlfriend named Olive Oyl, but a man in Japan did share something in common with the cartoon character named Popeye — a bulging biceps in his left upper arm, a new report of the man's case reveals. The 79-year-old man's visible...