News
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Neuroscience
Clumps of human nerve cells thrived in rat brains
New results suggest that environment matters for the development of brain organoids, 3-D nerve cell clusters that grow and mimic the human brain.
- Planetary Science
NASA’s DART mission successfully shoved an asteroid
Data obtained since the spacecraft intentionally crashed into an asteroid show that the impact altered the space rock’s orbit even more than intended.
- Astronomy
The James Webb Space Telescope spied the earliest born stars yet seen
The stars, found in the first released science image from the James Webb Space Telescope, probably winked into existence about 13 billion years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Cooperative sperm outrun loners in the mating race
Sperm that swim in clusters travel more directly toward the uterus, while overcoming fluid currents in the reproductive tract.
