D-BRIEF

Boosting Testosterone Helps Women Run Longer, Study Finds

Caster Semenya (right) competes during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Semenya filed a discrimination lawsuit against the International Association of Athletics Federations, challenging a rule that female athletes’ testosterone levels must be below a certain limit. (Credit: CP DC Press/Shutterstock)

New research finds that women with boosted testosterone levels develop more lean muscle mass and can run longer before getting tired.

Though some researchers and activists think t …

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Jupiter Shields Europa from Cosmic Rays That Could Erase Evidence of Life

(Credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel VFX/Univ. of Texas at Austin)

Europa, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, has an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust. In the coming years, scientists hope to send probes to the world to study the chemistry of its ocean and look for possible signs of alien life. One challenge in this quest is figuring out whether radiation hitting Europa would tamper with potential chemical evidence of life.

Luckily, it seems that scientists won’t have …

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Boeing’s Starliner Spacecraft Preps for Test Flights Ahead of Bringing Astronauts to ISS

Boeing’s Starliner capsule. (Credit: NASA)

NASA has confirmed that the aerospace company Boeing is pushing forward with their new Starliner crew capsule, which aims to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2020. But before the craft is deemed fit to carry a crew, it still must clear two critical tests.

The first test — the Pad Abort Test — will ensure the craft’s escape system works as expected during an emergency on the launch pad. That test is set to take pla …

THE CRUX

China and Europe Want to Build More Powerful Supercolliders. Is it Worth it?

Particle collisions event simulation at 13,000 GeV in the CMS, a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider. (Credit: CERN)

(Inside Science) — In 2012, particle physicists detected the long-sought-after Higgs boson for the first time. This particle was the last missing puzzle piece of what physicists call the Standard Model — the most thoroughly tested set of physical laws that govern our universe. The Higgs discovery was made possible by a giant machine in Europe, known as the  …

THE CRUX

How Scientists Know Our Human Ancestors Ate Insects

Today, insect eating is on the rise. Did our ancestors chow down on the critters, too? (Credit: CK Bangkok Photography/Shutterstock)

Anticipating food shortages in coming decades, some companies are touting insects as tomorrow’s protein source. Entrepreneurs are jumping on board and chips made of crickets are hitting grocery shelves. But scientists advise caution, saying more research is needed on the environmental impact of rearing insects at an industrial scale.

As sustainability exp …

NEUROSKEPTIC

A Frank Look at Female Orgasms and Rabbits

A very weak paper in PNAS has attracted some attention lately: An experimental test of the ovulatory homolog model of female orgasm

The paper aims to be a test of the hypothesis that the human female orgasm is a kind of evolutionary relic from an earlier stage in evolution.

In humans, ovulation happens on a monthly cycle and is not related to sexual activity. However, in some mammal species, such as rabbits, ovulation is triggered by sex (or copulation, as biologists say). In the new  …

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Rumbling ‘Marsquakes’ on the Red Planet are Mystifying and Exciting Scientists

NASA’s InSight lander has its seismic instrument tucked under a shield to protect it from wind and extreme temperatures. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA’s Mars InSight spacecraft landed on the Red Planet in November 2018. Scientists equipped the mission with a seismometer so they could learn how Mars releases seismic energy — that is, to get a feel for how the Red Planet rumbles. So far, InSight has recorded more than 100 seismic signals, and researchers are confident at least 21 of tho …

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Astronomers Zoom in on a Galaxy 9 Billion Light-years Away Thanks to Gravitational Lensing

(Credit: MIT/Image courtesy of the researchers)

When even the most powerful telescopes can’t capture the views you want, it helps to have natural magnifying glasses to rely on. In a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how they zoomed in to capture a young, star-forming galaxy roughly 9 billion light-years away in X-ray light.

To study such a distant galaxy, the researchers took advantage of the fact that massive objects can warp space-time around them and  …

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The Cosmos’ Most Powerful Magnets May Form When Stars Collide

These snapshots of two merging stars in action show the overall strength of the magnetic field in color (yellow is more magnetic), as well as the magnetic field lines (hatching). The stars on the left, which don’t have very strong magnetic fields, are just about to merge into a more massive and magnetic star (right). According to new research, such mergers can dramatically bolster the strength of the final star’s magnetic field. (Credit: F. Schneider et al./Nature volume 574, pages 211–214 (2 …

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This Interstellar Space Rock Looks a Lot Like Our Own Solar System’s Comets

The Gemini Observatory in Hawaii caught this first-ever color image of the interstellar comet Borisov and its faint tail. (Credit:Composite image by Travis Rector. Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA)

Asteroids, comets and other rocky objects litter the solar system, left over from when the planets formed. Scientists study these space rocks to learn about what the early solar system was like. Now, we’re entering an era in which we can learn about alien planetary systems in the same wa …