News
- Health & Medicine
A study questioning colonoscopy screening’s benefits has big caveats
The study included a lot of people who were invited to get the procedure but didn’t. That’s one limitation of several.
- Microbes
How fungi make potent toxins that can contaminate food
Genetically engineering Aspergillus fungi to delete certain proteins stops the production of mycotoxins that can be dangerous to human health.
- Environment
Heat waves in U.S. rivers are on the rise. Here’s why that’s a problem
In recent years, heat waves in U.S. rivers have gotten more frequent, causing trouble for fish, plants and water quality.
- 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.
