Discover Magazine: Latest Science Stories. 14-15 November 2018.

Many women accept menstrual cramps as a fact of life. But researchers say that some women have it worse than others and that it may be related to what they were fed as infants.

Female babies fed soy formula are prone to more painful periods during their young adult years, according to a new study published this week from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The research, published in Human Reproduction, found that soy feeding was associated with a 50 percent increased risk of modera …

It’s easy enough to spot similarities between orangutans and humans — the “man of the forest” can certainly act human, and they share our big brains, social structures and even opposable thumbs. It shouldn’t be too surprising, since we also share about 97 percent of our DNA with the great apes.

But a new finding, published today in Science Advances, suggests we may have even more in common than that, as orangutans showed the capacity for a form of abstract communication we’d n …

Most of Earth’s surface has been plotted, mapped and measured. And along the way, scientists have turned up a plethora of craters big and small. But there was always one major crater missing.

12,800 years ago, during the Pleistocene, Earth was warming up from its last Ice Age. Temperatures slowly rose while glaciers retreated, that is, until something major happened that triggered a cold snap big enough to leave its mark on the geologic record. Over the course of just decades – the bl …

First things first. This new article in Science Advances I’m about to discuss does not — I repeat, does not — say that an eruption will be happening soon at the Campi Flegrei in Italy. There is nothing in the paper that says we need to elevate the alert status or that anything fundamentally has changed about the current state of the caldera. So, nobody needs to panic.

Now that I have that out of the way, let’s actually talk science!

A new article that came out today in Science Advanc …

Put on your friendliest face and say hello to the newest member of our planetary neighborhood: Barnard’s star b.

An international team led by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science announced today that they’ve detected an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to Earth at just six light-years away. The astronomers calculate the newfound world, dubbed Barnard’s star b, to be about 3.2 times the mass of Earth and to orbit its host star once eve …

The death toll from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria numbers in the thousands. Excessive rain and flooding from the Atlantic hurricane season led to damages that cost at least $265 billion. Now, two new studies show how human activity is at fault.

“Tropical cyclones can have really strong impacts on people’s lives,” Christina Patricola, a climate scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, who led one of the new studies, said. “I wanted to be able to develop  …

Just six light-years from Earth, the second closest star system to our sun hosts a frozen super-Earth, according to new findings by an international team of researchers.

Barnard’s Star is a small, ancient kind of sun called a red dwarf. And while it’s not easily visible without a telescope, Barnard’s Star has long attracted astronomer’s gaze as the fastest moving star in the night sky. Astronomers now say it’s also home to a frozen exoplanet at least three times as massive as Earth, ma …

What does a martian sunrise sound like? Now you can find out, as researchers have “sonified” (or turned into sound) an image of the Opportunity rover’s 5,000th sunrise on Mars. The data have been used to create a unique, two-minute piece of music, titled “Mars Soundscapes” — check it out below:

To turn the photo into sound, researchers scanned across the image from left to right. They combined brightness and color from each individual …

An international team of astronomers can’t fully explain the “ghost” galaxy that they discovered about 130,000 light-years from the edge of the Milky Way.

Finding a Ghost

This galaxy, named Antlia 2 (or Ant 2), is described as a “ghost” because of how strangely dim it is. Ant 2 is rather large for a dwarf galaxy – it’s about the same size as the 7,000 light-year-wide Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which is the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy. Yet it’s 10,000 times faint …

A group of community members living in the Brazilian Amazon have created biodiversity hotspots by working to protect a single species, the giant South American river turtle. That’s according to a new study out Tuesday. The finding showcases the power of local conservation efforts, particularly in places that lack financial resources, the researchers say.

“Our research highlights the valuable conservation service currently provided by local communities, not just for turtles but for the w …