News
- Astronomy
Astronomers are puzzled over an enigmatic companion to a pulsar
The strange entity has a mass between that of a neutron star and a black hole. It’s either one or the other or something else entirely.
- Life
How disease-causing microbes load their tiny syringes to prep an attack
Tracking individual proteins in bacterial cells reveals a shuttle-bus system to load tiny syringes that inject our cells with havoc-wreaking proteins.
- Chemistry
Here’s how tardigrades go into suspended animation
A new study offers more clues about the role of oxidation in signaling transitions between alive and mostly dead in tardigrades.
- Animals
Some mysteries remain about why dogs wag their tails
Wagging is a form of communication, with different wags meaning different things, but scientists know little about the behavior’s evolution in dogs.
- Materials Science
Artificial intelligence helped scientists create a new type of battery
It took just 80 hours, rather than decades, to identify a potential new solid electrolyte using a combination of supercomputing and AI.
- Materials Science
A fiber inspired by polar bears traps heat as well as down feathers do
Scientists took a cue from polar bear fur to turn an ultralight insulating material into knittable thread.
- Archaeology
An ancient, massive urban complex has been found in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Found by airborne laser scans, this settlement and others throughout Mesoamerica and the Amazon are shifting how archaeologists think about urbanism.
- Climate
Numbats are built to hold heat, making climate change extra risky for the marsupials
New thermal imaging shows how fast numbats’ surface temperature rises even at relatively reasonable temperatures.
- Paleontology
The oldest known fossilized skin shows how life adapted to land
The nearly 290 million-year-old cast belonged to a species of amniotes, four-legged vertebrates that today comprises all reptiles, birds and mammals.
- Space
The strongest known fast radio burst has been traced to a 7-galaxy pileup
The galactic smashup, located 11 billion light-years from Earth, could have triggered star formation and also odd flares like the fast radio burst.
- Genetics
How ancient herders rewrote northern Europeans’ genetic story
New DNA analyses show the extent of the Yamnaya people’s genetic reach starting 5,000 years ago and how it made descendants prone to diseases like MS.
- Paleontology
Earth’s largest ape went extinct 100,000 years earlier than once thought
Habitat changes drove the demise of Gigantopithecus blacki, a new study reports. The find could hold clues for similarly imperiled orangutans.
