Uncategorized
- Animals
This tool-wielding assassin turns its prey’s defenses into a trap
This assassin bug's ability to use a tool — bees’ resin — could shed light on how the ability evolved in other animals.
- Chemistry
A chemical in plastics is tied to heart disease deaths
In 2018, over 350,000 excess heart disease deaths were linked to phthalates. More research is needed to fully understand the chemicals' effects.
- Environment
Skyborne specks of life may influence rainfall patterns
A study of weather on a mountain in Greece reveal that bioparticles in the sky may drive fluctuations in rainfall patterns more broadly.
- Archaeology
Neandertals may have hunted in horse-trapping teams 200,000 years ago
A revised age for a German site indicates that our evolutionary cousins organized horse ambushes around 200,000 years ago.
- Animals
Chimp chatter is a lot more like human language than previously thought
Chimpanzees combine hoots, calls and grunts to convey far more concepts than with single sounds alone. It may be a first among nonhuman animals.
- Health & Medicine
How to fight Lyme may lie in the biology of its disease-causing bacteria
The unusual molecular makeup of Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease, may hold clues for understanding and treating the tick-borne disease.
- Plants
Putrid plants can reek of hot rotting flesh with one evolutionary trick
Some stinky plants independently evolved an enzyme to take the same molecule behind our bad breath and turn it into the smell of rotting flesh.
- 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.
- 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.
