News
- Life
Duckbill decoded
With a mix of reptilian, bird and mammalian features, the duck-billed platypus genome looks as strange as the animal.
- Humans
Slowpoke settlers
Evidence suggests New World settlers slowly moved down the Pacific Coast and inhabited southern Chile by 14,000 years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Smart microbes
Bacteria are smarter than you might think. Single-celled microbes can learn to predict changes in their environments and prepare themselves.
- Climate
A little drier every day
The Sahara, one of the hottest and driest regions on Earth, gradually became arid over a period of centuries, a finding that contradicts many previous studies.
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- Space
A new look at the gamma-ray sky
Explosions pouring out as much energy in seconds as the sun does in its entire lifetime. Invisible beams of radiation sweeping across the sky like giant searchlights. Supermassive black holes emitting powerful and highly variable jets of radiation. GAMMA GLOW Simulation of the high-energy sky that will be seen by GLAST. Sonoma State, NASA The […]
- Health & Medicine
Glucose galore
Pregnant women with elevated blood sugar are more likely to have oversized babies, posing a risk to mother and newborn.
- Math
Less is more
Researchers have shown that a grip that’s too tight can be counterproductive, especially on a microscopic object — but the findings could apply to fields ranging from ecology to sociology.
- Space
Flooring the cosmic accelerator
If cosmologist Will Percival of the University of Portsmouth in England is right, the universe will end about 60 billion years from now, when every molecule and atom will be torn asunder by a mysterious entity that opposes gravity’s pull and turns it into a cosmic push.
- Ecosystems
Bring in the replacements
Missing links in ecosystems disrupted by extinctions could be restored by introducing species that perform the same function, new field experiments suggest.
- Health & Medicine
Leaving a mark
Child abuse may leave chemical marks on the brains of people who later kill themselves.
- Life
Brittle arms lose muscle
In lab simulations of future ocean conditions, brittle stars grow extra-calcified but puny arms.
