All Stories

  1. Archaeology

    Neandertals may have hunted in horse-trapping teams 200,000 years ago

    A revised age for a German site indicates that our evolutionary cousins organized horse ambushes around 200,000 years ago.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    How to fight Lyme may lie in the biology of its disease-causing bacteria

    The unusual molecular makeup of Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease, may hold clues for understanding and treating the tick-borne disease.

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  3. Plants

    Putrid plants can reek of hot rotting flesh with one evolutionary trick

    Some stinky plants independently evolved an enzyme to take the same molecule behind our bad breath and turn it into the smell of rotting flesh.

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  4. Science & Society

    $1.8 billion in NIH grant cuts hit minority health research the hardest

    News of NIH funding cuts have trickled out in recent months. A new study tallies what’s been terminated.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Teens who want to quit vaping have another medication option

    The drug varenicline, paired with counseling and text messaging support, helped teens and young adults abstain from vaping in a clinical trial.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Do cold-water plunges really speed post-workout muscle recovery?

    A new study is among the first to look at whether cold or hot soaks help women’s muscles rebound from extreme exercise.

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  7. Archaeology

    Neandertals invented bone-tipped spears all on their own

    An 80,000-year-old bone point found in Eastern Europe challenges the idea that migrating Homo sapiens gave the technology to Neandertals.

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  8. Oceans

    Before altering the air, microbes oxygenated large swaths of the sea

    Hundreds of millions of years before oxygen surged in the atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, swaths of oxygen winked in and out of existence in the ocean.

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  9. Archaeology

    British tin might have fueled the rise of some Bronze Age civilizations

    Chemical evidence of tin from coastal British sites reaching Bronze Age Mediterranean societies highlights a supply chain dispute.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Lining medical stents with hairlike fuzz could fend off infections

    Implanted tubes that transport bodily fluids can get gross. A lab prototype suggests a new vibration-based way to keep them clean and prevent infection.

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  11. Physics

    Physicists explain how cheese rosettes form

    Rosettes made by scraping Tête de Moine, or “monk’s head,” cheese result from variations in the friction between the blade and the cheese.

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  12. Space

    A Soviet spacecraft has returned to Earth

    Kosmos 482 launched for Venus in 1972 but never left Earth orbit. The spacecraft finally lost enough energy that it couldn't fight gravity anymore.

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