Museum of Science and Industry

While human eyes can see many colors, the greeneye fish—found at ocean depths between 160 to 3,300 feet—can really only detect a green color, meaning any non-green predators should have an advantage over this tiny fish. Yet scientists at Duke University discovered that these greeneye fish have color-changing lenses in their eyes, which pick up ultraviolet light and transmit it as a green color back to the...

Brian Hare, an anthropologist at Duke University, recently proposed the idea that bonobos are in fact domesticated versions of chimpanzees. While we associate the word "domestication" with humans acting to tame animals, Hare's idea involves proto-bonobos domesticating themselves.

His basic idea rests upon differences between bonobos and their closest living relative, the chimp. They both descended from a common ancestor until the forming Congo River split its population. Isolated by their...

Many of us have heard about the terrible air quality in Beijing, China in a very abstract way. On January 10, 2012 the Earth Observatory, a NASA operated imaging satellite, captured images of a large cloud of smog that limited visibility to 200 meters. Smog clouds like this are more common in the winter, due to a phenomenon known as temperature inversion. (Essentially, during the...

Like modern day Ahabs, the folks over at NASA have taken to designing a harpoon capable of tackling the great white beasts of space: comets! These notoriously chaotic celestial bodies tumble quickly and move at up to 150,000 mph while spewing forth a cloud of debris. Given the volatile character of these objects, it is dangerous to approach one too closely. Thus NASA is currently investigating shooting...