Science

Some scientists think Earth's oceans formed when icy comets hit the planet. But new research suggests a different origin for the oceans: they simply seeped out of the center of the Earth.

The finding, published in Science, suggests that a reservoir of water is hidden in the Earth's mantle, more than 400 miles below the surface. Try to refrain from imagining expanses of underground seas: all this water, three times the volume of water on the surface, is trapped inside rocks.

Featuring Dr. Alan Stern

Poor Pluto is finally getting a visit! To the disappointment of stargazers everywhere, the icy space rock, only 1/6 the size of Earth, was downgraded to a "dwarf planet" in 2006 as we learned more about our solar system. While we may not quite be over Pluto's "ex-planet" status, we have at least one thing to celebrate: Almost 90 years after its discovery, we're finally visiting Pluto!

Meet New Horizons

The latest episode of SSEC's Good Thinking! series, Fired Up About Energy, features a new classroom guide: Bunsen the (you guessed it) Bunsen burner. The episode focuses on teaching and discussing energy in the classroom, and explores common student misconceptions related to the topic.

Watch this video. WATCH. IT. If you're anything like me, it will leave you with your mouth hanging open, slightly unsettled, at one of nature's most incredible, disconcerting, skin-crawling species: 

Scientists at the University of California in San Francisco have been studying clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPRs for short, in prokaryotic (single-celled) organisms such as bacteria.

Cancer.

Brain freeze, sunburns, and bug bites -- welcome to summer! While summer in the Northern Hemisphere often conjures up images of swimming pools and beach umbrellas, it also comes with a few pains. While scientists can't make them go away (yet), they can at least tell us why we have to suffer through them! Maybe brain freeze, sunburns, and itchy bug bites can somehow be a good thing?

What causes brain freeze?