News
- 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.
By Sujata Gupta - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
By Nikk Ogasa - 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.
By Bruce Bower - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Animals
Ancient poems document the decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise
The porpoise is critically endangered. Ancient Chinese poems reveal the animal’s range has dropped about 65 percent over the past 1,400 years.
- Animals
Frog ribbits erupt via an extravagant variety of vocal sacs
Shape matters as well as size in the great range of male frog show-off equipment for competitive seductive serenades.
By Susan Milius - Astronomy
A gas cloud 5,500 times as massive as the sun lurks nearby
At 300 light-years away, the interstellar cloud is the closest of its kind ever found to Earth and the largest apparent single structure in the sky.