She probably had a headache. Digital X-ray shots of this Egyptian mummy, preserved at the Field Museum in Chicago and dated between the 7th and the 4th century B.C., found signs of erosion in the brain's parietal lobes, which may have been caused by parasites, anemia or malnourishment. Digital X-rays produce clearer images with less radiation exposure than traditional film X-rays.

This illustration of the Milky Way galaxy shows the position of the youngest known Milky Way supernova remnant, G1.9+0.3, as well as that of several supernovas found in our galaxy over the past 2,000 years. Read more

The concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane found in bubbles of ancient air (dark spots) trapped in Antarctic ice provide clues to ancient climate. Read more

The brown-throated three-toed sloth has become the first free-ranging animal to get brain wave monitoring for sleep studies. Read more...

Neutrons can produce 3-D scans of a magnetic field, even inside a solid. More

Because air pollution particles that fall into the PM10 range are too small to see with the naked eye, an apparently clear sky could host toxic concentrations of them. More

With webbed feet and venomous claws, the furry duck-billed platypus has a little bit of everything, and its genome does too. More

Wastes from fuel-ethanol production increasingly is finding its way into livestock feed. But the heavy loading of toxins in the ethanol byproduct can stunt the growth of pigs and reduce a farmer's bottom line. Read the full story.

Mouse lemurs, a group of hamster-sized mammals native to Madagascar, distinguish potential lovers from their look-alikes by their song, scientists report. Having different booty calls prevents the creatures from pursuing a mate of the wrong species, says zoologist Pia Braune of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany. Read more

More than one species of the nocturnal, diminutive primates called mouse lemurs may dwell in the same area of the forest and often they look extremely similar, says zoologist Pia Braune of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany. But experiments that played back the calls of grey mouse lemurs and golden brown mouse lemurs reveal that the animals respond more to crooning from their own species than outsiders. Analyses of the animals’ ultrasonic calls revealed differences in the length and composition of each species song. During mating season, the night swells with noise, s...

OUT WITH THE BOYS For two weeks, multiple male moor frogs (Rana arvalis) congregate and call for females. Credit: Theresa Knopp

Silently slinking through tight corridors between the branches of corals, moray eels spook fish, squid and divers alike. Fish and squid more so, of course, as they may well become the next meal for the voracious predators. Unlike other eels and bony fishes, morays consume large prey whole and with a minimum of jostling — the tight space around them would never allow such freedom of movement. They accomplish the task by gripping their victims with a second pair of pharyngeal jaws in their throat. Rita Mehta of the University of California, Davis documents the throaty jaws and the feeding proc...

TOPOLOGICAL HARMONY Familiar relationships between sets of musical notes, such as transposition between chords, directly translate into geometrical structures such as this Möbius strip — where each dot represents a class of equivalent two-note chords — or into more complex structures. MORE

Astronomers have used the radio-emitting water molecules (illustrated here), or masers, at the heart of the galaxy NGC 4258 to find a more accurate value of the Hubble constant and shed new light on dark energy. Full story

When coral broadcast their egg-sperm bundles, the buoyant particles rise to the water's surface and color it a bright pink, as they did here in 2005, at the Scott Reef in western Australia. The embryos and larvae stick around for one to two days before settling to the ocean bottom and being consumed by hungry ocean dwellers.