News
- Humans
Ancient sculptures hint at universal facial expressions across cultures
Interpreting the emotions carved onto sculptures from long ago offers a new way to study how humans perceive facial expressions.
- Tech
Methanol fuel gives this tiny beetle bot the freedom to roam
A new robot insect uses energy-dense methanol as fuel, not batteries. It could be a blueprint for future search-and-rescue bots with long run times.
- Animals
Culling dingoes with poison may be making them bigger
Meat laced with toxic powder has been used for decades to kill dingoes. Now, dingoes in baited areas are changing: They’re getting bigger.
- Health & Medicine
Dust can spread influenza among guinea pigs, raising coronavirus questions
In three out of 12 guinea pig pairs, an animal coated in influenza virus, but immune to infection, spread the virus to another rodent through dust.
- Astronomy
In a first, astronomers spotted a space rock turning into a comet
Scientists have caught a space rock in the act of shifting from a Kuiper Belt object to a comet. That process won’t be complete until 2063.
- Earth
Death Valley hits 130° F, the hottest recorded temperature on Earth since 1931
Amid a heat wave in the western United States, California’s Death Valley is back in the record books with the third hottest temperature ever recorded.
- Life
How two new fungus species got named after the COVID-19 pandemic
Tiny fuzz on a beetle and fake leopard spots on palms now have Latin names that will forever nod to the new coronavirus.
- Astronomy
Hubble watched a lunar eclipse to see Earth from an alien’s perspective
Hubble observed sunlight filtering through Earth’s atmosphere during a lunar eclipse to see what a habitable exoplanet’s atmosphere might look like.
- Science & Society
Interfaith soccer teams eased Muslim-Christian tensions — to a point
Soccer bonded Christian and Muslim teammates in Iraq, but that camaraderie didn’t change attitudes.
- Neuroscience
Newly discovered cells in mice can sense four of the five tastes
Some cells in mice can sense bitter, sweet, sour and umami. Without the cells, some flavor signals don’t get to the ultimate tastemaker — the brain.
- Archaeology
The oldest known grass beds from 200,000 years ago included insect repellents
Found in South Africa, 200,000-year-old bedding remnants included fossilized grass, bug-repelling ash and once aromatic camphor leaves.
- Life
Climate change, not hunters, may have killed off woolly rhinos
Ancient DNA indicates that numbers of woolly rhinos held steady long after people arrived on the scene.
