Articles by

Maria Temming

Here’s how boa constrictors squeeze their dinner without suffocating themselves

The boa constrictor’s choke hold is an iconic animal attack. By coiling around its prey, a snake...

50 years ago, Arecibo got an unprecedented view of Venus’ surface

Probing Venus’ mountains — Science News, February 12, 1972 Venus’ perpetually cloud-shrouded surface remains penetrable only...

Americans tend to assume imaginary faces are male

There may be a reason we see a man, rather than a maiden, in the moon. When...

Here’s what the next 10 years of space science could look like

The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey is basically a sneak preview of the next 10 years of...

Gender-affirming care improves mental health for transgender youth

Daniel’s birth certificate is marked “female,” but Daniel is nonbinary — not exclusively male nor female. “I’m...

Vera Rubin’s work on dark matter led to a paradigm shift in cosmology

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and BeyondAshley Jean YeagerMIT Press, $24.95 Vera Rubin’s research forced cosmologists to...

Greece’s Santorini volcano erupts more often when sea level drops

When sea level drops far below the present-day level, the island volcano Santorini in Greece gets ready...

A super-short gamma-ray burst defies astronomers’ expectations

A surprisingly short gamma-ray burst has astronomers rethinking what triggers these celestial cataclysms. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space...