All Stories

  1. Genetics

    Ancient DNA unveils Siberian Neandertals’ small-scale social lives

    Females often moved into their mate’s communities, which totaled about 20 individuals, researchers say.

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  2. Genetics

    Black Death immunity came at a cost to modern-day health

    A genetic variant that boosts Crohn’s disease risk may have helped people survive the 14th century bubonic plague known as the Black Death.

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  3. Astronomy

    For the first time, astronomers saw dust in space being pushed by starlight

    Images collected over 16 years reveal that dust expelled from a well-known binary star system is hurried on its way by light from those stars.

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  4. Psychology

    The pandemic shows us how crises derail young adults’ lives for decades

    Age matters for when we experience calamities, such as pandemics. Young adults are especially vulnerable to getting thrown off their life course.

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  5. Animals

    Honeybees order numbers from left to right, a study claims

    In experiments, bees tend to go to smaller numbers on the left, larger ones on the right. But the idea of a mental number line in animals has critics.

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  6. Animals

    Some seabirds survive typhoons by flying into them

    Streaked shearwaters off the coast of Japan soar for hours near the eye of passing cyclones as a strategy to weather the storm.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    A swarm of sneaky omicron variants could cause a COVID-19 surge this fall

    Scientists are tracking similar mutations showing up in many variants that help the coronavirus evade some of our immune defenses and treatments.

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  8. Earth

    50 years ago, scientists found a new way to clean up oil spills

    In the 1970s, researchers added chemicals to the list of oil spill cleanup methods. Soon, they may add microbes.

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  9. Astronomy

    A 3-D model of the Cat’s Eye nebula shows rings sculpted by jets

    The Cat’s Eye is one of the most complex nebulae known. A 3-D reconstruction reveals the source of some of that complexity.

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  10. Life

    This ancient worm might be an important evolutionary missing link

    A roughly 520-million-year-old fossil may be the common ancestor of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates.

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  11. Archaeology

    Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands

    Urban growth around 4,600 years ago, near what is now southern Iraq, occurred on marshy outposts that lacked a city center.

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  12. Paleontology

    Dinosaur ‘mummies’ may not be rare flukes after all

    Bite marks on a fossilized dinosaur upend the idea that exquisite skin preservation must result from a carcass's immediate smothering under sediment.

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