Maris Fessenden

 

Maris Fessenden is a freelance science writer and artist who appreciates small things and wide open spaces.

Beyond Owls And Larks: There Are Four Types of Sleepers

The two new groups include people who are rather energetic all day and others who are lethargic

A Single Smelly Compound Sparks Carnivores' Lust for Blood

When given scented wooden blocks soaked in this single chemical, captive carnivores go wild

Can’t Clap to the Beat? You Might be Beat-Deaf

For some people, tapping their foot to the beat is a challenge at a fundamental level

Prehistoric cave painting of a steppe bison from Altamira, Spain

Researchers Are Examining a 9,000-Year-Old Bison Mummy

The well-mummified specimen of a steppe bison, a now-extinct species that lived in the Ice Age, has intact organs

Performers in "Multiverse" during the opening of a 2010 art festival in Kiev

What If There Are Parallel Universes Jostling Ours?

It could explain a lot of weird, quantum physics

Large Dinosaurs Had a Nesting Strategy to Avoid Breaking Eggs

Oviaptorosaurs likely kept their eggs in open nests—more like bird than crocodiles—but needed to arrange their eggs carefully

The World of Personal Computers in the 1980s Was A Wacky, Wonderful Place

You can experience early video games and operating systems yourself through retrocomputing and ads

Arctic Squirrels Use Steroids to Bulk Up But Don’t Suffer the Consequences

Fat alone couldn’t get these squirrels through hibernation in burrows that get almost as chilly as -10 degrees Fahrenheit

The International Space Station Just Avoided a Collision With Space Junk

A four-minute maneuver by a docked, unmanned European spacecraft pushed the ISS out of the path of a hand-sized chuck of space debris

A gray wolf, not the animal spotted at the Grand Canyon

A Lone Gray Wolf May Have Wandered Into the Grand Canyon

Officials haven’t confirmed whether the canine is a full-blooded gray wolf, but wolf advocates are pretty convinced

Even Climate Scientists Are Getting Depressed by Our Lack of Progress

Anxiety about the changing environment isn’t just affecting you and professionals are working to understand it

Scratching an Itch Soothes, But Then Your Brain Makes it Worse

Pain overrides itchiness temporarily but neurotransmitters released to cope with that pain reactivate the itch neurons

A Big Circle named J1 in Jordan stretches 1,280 feet in diameter and the center has been bulldozed

These Giant Circles in the Mideast Are One of the World's Last Mysteries

Archaeologists have found more than a dozen ancient circles in Turkey, Syria and Jordan—but don’t know why they were built

The Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool

How to Protect the Lincoln Memorial From Crazy Flooding

The capital city's decades-old system of levees to keep water back during storms and flooding is getting an upgrade

A Siberian musk deer two-month old stands next to his father at the Edinburgh zoo — they are closely related to the species just spotted

Fanged Deer Not Extinct, Still Roaming the Mountains of Afghanistan

The Kashmir musk deer was last spotted in 1948 but now researchers report five recent sightings

We Can Measure How Traffic Vibrates the Earth

Special instruments called geophones help researchers distinguish the signatures of big trucks rumbling down the highway and planes taking off

Your Reaction to “Gross” Pictures Can Betray Your Political Beliefs

Liberal and conservative brains show different activity patterns when they look at pictures of things typically thought of as disgusting

Australia’s Koalas Have Chlamydia, But a New Vaccine Could Save Them

The sexually transmitted disease threatens the health of one of Australia’s iconic marsupials

An artist's impression of the triple-star system of GG Tau-A, which might have the right conditions for planet formation

This Newly Forming Planet Will Have Three Suns

A triple-star system has two disks of gas and dust that could form planets

Why Doctors Still Don’t Know What's Causing a Paralysis-Inducing Illness in Children

More children are showing up with limb flaccidness than health officials would expect, but the illness remains rare and mysterious

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