News
- Archaeology
Ancient Clovis people may have taken tool cues from earlier Americans
Ancient Americans’ spearpoints may have heralded later Clovis weapons.
By Bruce Bower - Climate
Hurricane Willa breaks an eastern and central Pacific storm season record
The combined might of eastern and central Pacific hurricanes produced a record-breaking year of storm energy.
- Health & Medicine
Teens use Juul e-cigarettes much more often than other vaping products
Such devices are more popular among youth than other e-cigarettes or regular cigarettes, a study finds.
- Agriculture
Plants engineered to always be on alert don’t grow well
Scientists bred a type of weed to lack proteins that help stem the production of bitter chemicals used to ward off insect attacks.
- Genetics
DNA differences are linked to having same-sex sexual partners
Genetic differences are associated with choosing same-sex partners in both men and women.
- Health & Medicine
New therapies pack a triple-drug punch to treat cystic fibrosis
In testing, a triple-drug therapy significantly improved lung function in cystic fibrosis patients with the most common disease-causing mutation.
- Paleontology
In a first, scientists spot what may be lungs in an ancient bird fossil
Possible traces of lungs preserved with a 120-million-year-old bird fossil could represent a respiratory system similar to that of modern birds.
- Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence crowdsources data to speed up drug discovery
A new AI that judges whether drugs will interact with certain proteins can train on data from multiple sources while keeping that info secret.
- Archaeology
The water system that helped Angkor rise may have also brought its fall
A complex water system magnified flooding’s disruption of the medieval Cambodian city of Angkor.
By Bruce Bower - Earth
These ancient mounds may not be the earliest fossils on Earth after all
A new analysis suggests that tectonics, not microbes, formed cone-shaped structures in 3.7-billion-year-old rock.
- Particle Physics
What the electron’s near-perfect roundness means for new physics
The electron remains stubbornly round, meaning we may need to build beyond the Large Hadron Collider to find physics outside of the standard model.
- Health & Medicine
A mysterious polio-like disease has sickened as many as 127 people in the U.S.
Medical experts are trying to trace the cause of 62 confirmed cases of acute flaccid myelitis this year.