News
- Life
Lithium mining may be putting some flamingos in Chile at risk
Climate change and lithium mining are threatening the flooded salt flats that flamingos in Chile depend on, a study suggests.
- Health & Medicine
School mask mandates in the U.S. reduced coronavirus transmission
Mandatory masking lowered transmission rates to nearly one-fourth those of schools where masks were optional, data from over 1 million children show.
- Paleontology
A new saber-toothed mammal was among the first hypercarnivores
A 42-million-year-old jawbone with slicing teeth and a gap to fit saberlike teeth is pegged to a new species of the mysterious Machaeroidine group.
- Animals
How to make irresistible traps for Asian giant hornets using sex
Traps baited with compounds found in the sex pheromone of hornet queens attracted thousands of males in China.
- Astronomy
Some of the sun’s iconic coronal loops may be illusions
Folds in the plasma that streams from the sun might trick the eye into seeing the well-defined arches, computer simulations of the solar atmosphere show.
- Astronomy
Earth’s purported ‘nearest black hole’ isn’t a black hole
A disputed multiple-star system doesn’t have a black hole, as once reported, but is actually a missing piece in binary star evolution.
- Animals
The spongy moth’s new name replaces an ethnic slur
The Entomological Society of America renamed Lymantria dispar the “spongy moth,” replacing its previous problematic common name, “gypsy moth.”
- Archaeology
Ancient Homo sapiens took a talent for cultural creativity from Africa to Asia
Excavations at two sites continents apart show that Stone Age hominids got culturally inventive starting nearly 100,000 years ago.
- Earth
The mysterious Hiawatha crater in Greenland is 58 million years old
An impact crater spotted in 2015 in Greenland is far too old to be connected to the Younger Dryas cold snap from 13,000 years ago, a study suggests.
- Animals
Genetically modified mosquitoes could be tested in California soon
The EPA also OK’d more trials in Key West, Fla. Both states now get their say in whether to release free-flying Aedes aegypti to sabotage their own kind.
- Genetics
An extinct rat shows CRISPR’s limits for resurrecting species
Scientists recovered most of the Christmas Island rat’s genome. But the missing genes signal a problem for using gene editing to de-extinct species.
- Animals
Culturally prized mountain goats may be vanishing from Indigenous land in Canada
As fewer mountain goats are spotted along British Columbia’s central coast, First Nations people team up with biologists to assess the population.
