All Stories
- Microbes
Horsetail spores don’t need legs to jump
Forget legs. A plant uses curly, humidity-controlled ribbons to make epic leaps.
- Animals
Avoiding feces may be ‘luxury’ wild mice can’t afford
For a mouse in the woods, finding any food at all may trump poopy locations.
- Health & Medicine
Fructose may be key to weight gain
Mice that could not make or metabolize the sugar gained less weight than normal mice.
- Chemistry
Meteorite that fell last year contains surprising molecules
Compounds in space rocks like the one that broke up over California may have helped seed life on Earth.
- Math
Egypt wasn’t built in a day, but it did rise quickly
New timeline of ancient civilization’s earliest days finds little time between earliest villages and dominant centralized state.
- Humans
Babies perk up to sounds of ancient hazards
Evolution has primed infants to focus on noises linked to longstanding dangers, a new study finds.
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- Environment
Grain alcohol in gasoline?
An excerpt from the September 21, 1963, issue of Science News Letter.
- Science & Society
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist
Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII by Jack El-Hai.
- Psychology
Behind the Shock Machine
The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments by Gina Perry.
- Earth
World’s largest volcano lurks beneath Pacific Ocean
The dormant behemoth may rival ones on Mars.
- Life
Many genes in dolphins and bats evolved in the same way to allow echolocation
Widespread changes scattered across the genomes of distantly related species cooperated to craft the trait.
