News
- Archaeology
Ancient stone-tool making method arose multiple times
Hominids in both Africa and Eurasia independently invented a flake-tool technique hundreds of thousands of years ago, countering a long-held idea in archaeology.
- Neuroscience
Mighty muscles may stave off depression
Strong muscles protect the brain from stress-induced toxin associated with depression, a study in mice suggests.
- Life
Fledgling birds change rules for caterpillar color
An unusual experiment shows that larvae lose the advantage of warning colors during the seasonal flush of naïve predators.
- Health & Medicine
More than 1 million Ebola cases may hit West Africa by January
New projections of the outbreak suggest that without drastic improvements, weekly cases could increase from hundreds to thousands.
- Cosmology
Gravitational wave discovery gives way to Milky Way dust
New polarization maps from the Planck satellite suggest that the BICEP2 announcement this year of primordial gravitational waves might be due entirely to dust in our galaxy.
- Health & Medicine
Statins may improve odds of surviving a bleeding stroke
Common cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may help people who have suffered a stroke caused by ruptured blood vessels.
- Neuroscience
Dyslexic brain may solve some math problems in a roundabout way
Children with dyslexia rely heavily on right brain to do addition problems.
- Tech
Hopping robot powered by explosions
A soft-bodied robot that can jump with the help of an explosion could one day aid search-and-rescue operations.
- Environment
Crops take up drugs from recycled water
Plants irrigated with recycled wastewater can soak up tiny amounts of pharmaceutical compounds but what this means for human health is unclear.
- Plants
Borrowed genes raise hopes for fixing “slow and confused” plant enzyme
Inserting some bacterial Rubisco chemistry into a plant might one day boost photosynthesis and help raise crop yields.
- Astronomy
Enormous black hole resides at core of tiny galaxy
A small galaxy stores 15 percent of its mass in a black hole, suggesting compact galaxies might be shreds of once larger galaxies.
- Earth
Shrinking ancient sea may have spawned Sahara Desert
The Saharan Desert probably formed 7 million years ago as the ancient Tethys Sea, the forerunner of the Mediterranean Sea, shrank.
