News
- Animals
A ‘trapdoor’ made of muscle and fat helps fin whales eat without choking
An “oral plug” may explain how lunge-feeding fin whales don’t choke and drown as they fill their mouths with prey and water while eating.
- Archaeology
Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws
Long metal tubes enabled communal beer drinking more than 5,000 years ago, scientists say.
- Chemistry
A disinfectant made from sawdust mows down deadly microbes
Antimicrobial molecules found in wood waste could be used to make more sustainable, greener disinfectants.
- Earth
Volcanic avalanches of rock and gas may be more destructive than previously thought
Pressures within pyroclastic flows may be as much as three times as great as observations had suggested.
- Genetics
A genetic analysis hints at why COVID-19 can mess with smell
People with some genetic variants close to smell-related genes had an 11 percent higher risk of losing their sense of taste or smell.
- Animals
Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans
Syria’s 4,500-year-old kungas were donkey-wild ass hybrids, genetic analysis reveals, so the earliest known example of humans crossing animal species.
- Astronomy
An early outburst portends a star’s imminent death
An eruption before a stellar explosion was the first early warning sign for a standard type of supernova.
- Planetary Science
Organic molecules in an ancient Mars meteorite formed via geology, not alien life
Analysis of an ancient Martian meteorite reveals that organic molecules within it were formed by geologic processes rather than alien life.
- Quantum Physics
Quantum particles can feel the influence of gravitational fields they never touch
A quantum phenomenon predicted in 1959, the Aharonov-Bohm effect, also applies to gravity.
- Astronomy
Astronomers identified a second possible exomoon
Kepler 1708 b i, a newly discovered candidate for an exoplanet moon, has a radius about 2.6 times that of Earth, a new study suggests.
- Animals
The largest group of nesting fish ever found lives beneath Antarctic ice
Researchers stumbled upon a fish breeding colony of unprecedented size, spanning a territory slightly larger than Baltimore.
- Anthropology
Homo sapiens bones in East Africa are at least 36,000 years older than once thought
Analyses of remnants of a volcanic blast push the age of East Africa’s oldest known H. sapiens fossils at Ethiopia’s Omo site to 233,000 years or more.
