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    Melissa Cronin

    Melissa Cronin

    Editorial Assistant, HuffPost Science

  • Viral Video Lampoons German Language, But What Do Linguists Say?

    The video is fun to watch, but it may reflect a common if generally unspoken feeling about the tough, guttural sounds of spoken German. "When people talk about 'harsh-sounding' languages, they're usually referring to languages that have sounds made in the back of the vocal tract," Dr. Lisa Davidson, a professor of linguistics at New York University, told The Huffington Post in an email. "There's no reason to believe the 'linguistic myth' that certain languages are inherently harsh-sounding in any objective sense," Thomas Shannon, Professor of German Linguistics and Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Huffington Post in an email.

  • Ancient 'Halls Of The Dead' Unearthed In Open Field

    Archaeologists have unearthed two nearly 6,000-year-old burial mounds and the remains of two massive buildings in England. "The buildings seemed to have been deliberately burned down," said Julian Thomas, the archaeologist leading the excavation and a professor at the University of Manchester. Researchers believe these halls of the living may have been transformed into "halls of the dead" after a leader or important social figure died.

  • Super-Dense Stars Reveal Their Secrets

    Scientists have uncovered a new key to understanding the strange workings of neutron stars — objects so dense they pack the mass of multiple suns into a space smaller than a city. It turns out there is a universal relationship linking a trio of properties related to how fast the star spins and how easily its shape deforms. This relationship could help astronomers understand the physics inside neutron stars' cores, and distinguish these stars from their even weirder cousins, quark stars.

  • Meat Treat Study Offers New View Of How Dogs See The World

    How do dogs see the world? Given their limited color "rainbow," do dogs really make use of their color vision to make decisions -- or do they depend solely on levels of brightness? "In the past, it's been easier to test whether dogs respond to brightness," sais Dr. Stanley Coren, a University of British Columbia dog vision expert who was not involved in the new research.

  • Debate Erupts Over Cause Of Mud Disaster

    A catastrophic mud eruption in Indonesia blamed on drilling by an oil company might instead have natural causes, new research suggests. In 2006, the largest mud volcano on the planet was born when steam, water and mud began erupting on the Indonesian island of Java. The mud volcano still erupts with outbursts like a geyser.

  • CEO Confirms Historic Moon Landing Finding

    Forty-four years (and three days) after it helped launch the first men to walk on the moon, a huge rocket engine part salvaged from the ocean floor has been positively identified as a historic component of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission. "I'm thrilled to share some exciting news," Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos wrote Friday (July 19) on his Bezos Expeditions website. In March 2012, the billionaire entrepreneur underwrote a private — and secret — expedition to find and recover the Apollo engines that launched astronauts Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.

  • New Study Spotlights Upside Of Worried Worms

    A frightened earthworm is a plant's best friend. Researchers testing the ecological role of the earthworm Pheretima aspergillum (pictured above) in an alpine meadow have found that when a beetle that preys on earthworms is present, plants grew more. The presence of the beetles also increased the quality of the deeper soil, reported this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

  • EXPLAINED: How Dinosaurs Kept Their Chompers Sharp

    Some plant-eating dinosaurs grew new teeth every couple of months, with some of the largest herbivores developing a replacement tooth every 35 days, to keep their chompers from getting too worn down on all that vegetation, new research finds. A team of scientists studied the Diplodocus and Camarasaurus, two different types of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs, or sauropods, to determine if their diets may have influenced how often they developed new teeth.

  • Bees Don't Deserve Credit For Honeycombs?

    The perfect hexagonal array of bees’ honeycombs, admired for millennia as an example of natural pattern formation, owes more to simple physical forces than to the skill of bees, according to a new study. Engineer Bhushan Karihaloo at the University of Cardiff, UK, and his co-workers say that bees simply make cells that are circular in cross section and are packed together like a layer of bubbles. According to their research, which appears in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the wax, softened by the heat of the bees’ bodies, then gets pulled into hexagonal cells by surface tension at the junctions where three walls meet.

  • Neanderthals Weren't Lost In Translation After All, Linguists Say

    When you picture Neanderthals, you might imagine subhuman brutes grunting -- but new research suggests these ancient hominids were more articulate than previously thought. A recent paper, authored by Dutch scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, argues that not only did Neanderthals and modern humans interact and interbreed -- but they also likely shared some elements of speech and language. In fact, this new research claims that modern language and speech date back to the most recent ancestor we shared with the Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis.

  • LOOK: Alien Planet's True Color Detected

    A navy-blue world orbiting a faraway star is the first exoplanet to have its colour measured. Last December, astrophysicist Tom Evans at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the planet and its host star. Hubble's optical resolution is not high enough to actually 'see' the planet as a dot of light separate from its star, so instead, the telescope receives light from both objects that mix into a single point source.

  • UNEARTHED: Sphinx Paws Show Up In Surprising Place

    Archaeologists digging in Israel say they have made an unexpected find: the feet of an Egyptian sphinx linked to a pyramid-building pharaoh. The fragment of the statue's front legs was found in Hazor, a UNESCO World Heritage Site just north of the Sea of Galilee. Between the paws is a hieroglyphic inscription with the name of king Menkaure, sometimes called Mycerinus, who ruled Egypt during the Old Kingdom more than 4,000 years ago and built one of the great Giza pyramids.

  • WATCH: Private Rocket Makes Highest Jump Yet

    A private company's prototype reusable rocket made its highest leap to date last month, soaring 100 stories into the air before landing softly back at its launch pad as planned. In its sixth-ever test flight, SpaceX's experimental Grasshopper rocket hopped to a maximum altitude of 1,066 feet (325 meters) on June 14. It then made a slow and controlled descent back to Earth at the company's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

  • Ancient Icy Lake Teeming With Complex Life?

    Microbes that live inside fish intestines are among the array of life that appear to have been found in ice drilled from above Lake Vostok, the deepest lake buried beneath Antarctica's ice sheet. Called accretion ice, scientists first reported evidence of microbes in this ice in the journal Science in 1999. In some spots above the lake, the accretion ice is more than 650 feet (200 meters) thick and 20,000 years old, scientists believe.

  • Mars Rover Hits Major Milestone

    On the 10th anniversary of its launch, NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars is also celebrating reaching the halfway point in its drive from one crater-rim segment to another. The Opportunity rover, which is still going strong on the Red Planet long after its official mission was slated to end, is journeying 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) from the spot it studied for the past 22 months, on the edge of Mars' Endeavour crater, to another area where it will begin a new phase in its research. Sunday (July 7) marks the 10th anniversary of Opportunity's launch from Earth with its sister rover Spirit, which shut down on Mars in 2010.

  • Surprising Skull Discovery Has Historians Scratching Their Heads

    A skull unearthed in Australia may belong to the first white man to set foot on the continent -- and it's not who historians might expect. The skull was found in Taree, a town about 200 miles north of Sydney, in November 2011 by local police, who expected to carry out a murder investigation on the remains. If that's correct, the finding suggests that Captain James Cook may not have been the first white man to reach the continent.

  • LOOK: Scientists Who Snack On Their Studies

    "We just took off a little piece and ate it raw," said Girguis, a professor at Harvard University. A long-standing marine biology mantra holds that scholars should taste their species of study ... or at least waste not, want not. Marine biologist Win Watson recalls annual "Make a Dish from Your Animal" dinners at the Woods Hole Oceanic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., during the 1970s and 1980s.

  • Strange Pouched Predator Had 'Embarrassing' Bite, Researchers Say

    More than 3 million years ago, a strange pouched predator stalked South America with fangs bigger than those of the fearsome saber-toothed cat. But a new study shows that despite its imposing dental profile, this ancient carnivore had a bite no stronger than that of a house cat — something the researcher called "embarrassing." Instead, it packed most of its power in a robust set of arms, strong neck muscles and knack for precision, researchers say. Named Thylacosmilus atrox ("pouch saber"), the animal was about the size of a jaguar, but "looked and behaved like nothing alive today," paleontologist Stephen Wroe said in a statement.

  • WATCH: 'Moonrise' Spotted On Red Planet

    The video, which stitches together 86 frames snapped by Curiosity's navigation camera, shows the Mars moon Phobos rising shortly after sunset on June 28, 2013. Mount Sharp's many layers hold a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions over time, and Curiosity scientists want the 1-ton robot to read this history like a book as it climbs up through the mountain's lower reaches.

  • Are We Losing The War On Cancer?

    Richard Nixon launched the so-called War on Cancer on December 23, 1971, in what was supposed to be a “moonshot” effort to cure the disease. Two years later, a Time magazine cover read, “Toward Control of Cancer.” Two decades after that, it announced, in bold red letters, “Hope in the War Against Cancer,” surmising that “a turning point” may have been reached. In 2001, its cover asked if the blood cancer drug Gleevec “is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.” And this past April, the newsweekly pronounced “How to Cure Cancer.” Yet roughly one hundred and forty thousand Americans have died from the disease in the last three months.