Taxonomy term

More than 13 million people live in Tokyo, a city that has been devastated by earthquakes in the past and is likely to be rocked again. Since the massive magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, recurrence intervals for nondamaging slow-slip quakes beneath Japan's capital have shortened. And that has left seismologists to wonder if this aseismic creep could be signaling a countdown to Tokyo's next "big one."

As Curiosity and Opportunity rove around Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Express and Mars Odyssey orbit above, and scientists on Earth study the Red Planet from afar, new findings are announced almost weekly. Here are a few of the latest updates.

In the heart of the U.S. Midwest, basalt cliffs and lava flows point to a massive break in the continental crust that occurred a little more than a billion years ago, a feature known as the Midcontinent Rift. Splitting the strong, thick North American craton — the stable interior of the continent — would have required dramatic geologic events. Geologists have long suspected two leading scenarios: a plume of hot mantle rock that sat beneath the several-hundred-kilometer-thick lithosphere, something like the one that sits below Yellowstone today; or mantle material upwelling beneath a zone where the Grenville Orogeny had pulled the rigid continental crust apart as a new supercontinent formed.

Scientific research has traditionally been funded by grants from various governmental agencies, along with funding from universities, corporations and private foundations. But money is often given out in large chunks to big research labs, leaving smaller, shorter-term projects in need of funding. Now, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter — through which a large number of people donate small amounts of cash — are changing the landscape of research grant funding.