Scientific American casts a cold eye on music makers, and clinically reveals that yes, music really matters:

To record brain stem responses, the researchers placed electrodes on the heads of 30 people who were either musicians or non-musicians. The electrodes measured the electric currents that send signals through the brain stem, while the participants listened to an infant’s unhappy cry.

The [...]

Esquire sings with neurological romance, using brain scans to tell a husband’s stirring story of the brain in love:

Against all odds, I’m still hot for my wife. Chemically, I’m at the most unmanly point in my life. A guy’s testosterone drops when he gets married. (I’m nine years in.) It also drops when he has kids. (I’ve got three [...]

LiveScience has interviewed some microbiologists who have woken up an alien(-ish) organism from the Greenland ice cap after a 120,000-year nap:

“Microbes have found ways to survive in harsh conditions for long times that we don’t yet fully understand,” Brenchley told LiveScience.

To coax the bacteria back to life, Brenchley, Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and their Penn State colleagues incubated the samples [...]

So you get a cut – ouch! – and you put a band-aid on it, but first, you make sure you disinfect it with hydrogen peroxide. It gets all fizzy and then it’s cleaner, right? Ever wonder how that works? Well, some fish researchers have found out that hydrogen peroxide is like a fire alarm for white blood [...]

National Geographic breaks the worrying news that Betelgeuse is shrinking:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, first measured the star in 1993 with an infrared instrument on top of Southern California’s Mount Wilson. They estimated the star to be as big around as Jupiter’s orbit around the sun.

But measurements made since then using the same instrument show that Betelgeuse [...]

Gustave Whitehead was a Bavarian immigrant to Connecticut who in all likelihood made a steam-powered machine fly for more than half a mile in 1899 – not only a longer distance than the Wright Brothers’ flight, but also four years earlier.

Whitehead was a factory worker whose English wasn’t the greatest, and no one had a camera handy for [...]

That sounds so totally metal, doesn’t it? Technology Review explains how to make a sound so heavy, no light can escape:

One of the many curious properties of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a gravitational field. That sets up the [...]

The Discovery Channel salutes the new owners of Planet Earth, now that we humans have eliminated the fish that were keeping them in check. Whales, dolphins, even giant squid are powerful to prevent the march of the giant jellyfish:

These huge creatures can burst through fishing nets, as well as destroy local fisheries with their taste for fish eggs [...]

This science comic tells the truth.

They do, you know.