News
- Planetary Science
Titan’s dark dunes could be made from comets
Saturn’s largest moon could have gotten its sands from an ancient reshuffling of the solar system. If true, that would solve a long-standing mystery.
- Health & Medicine
Don’t use unsterilized tap water to rinse your sinuses. It may carry brain-eating amoebas
Two new studies document rare cases in which people who rinsed sinuses with unsterilized tap got infected with brain-eating amoebas.
- Animals
Male dragonflies’ wax coats might protect them against a warming climate
The reflective wax, which cools males on sunny courtship flights, may also armor them against the effects of climate change.
- Animals
Male mammals aren’t always bigger than females
In a study of over 400 mammal species, less than half have males that are, on average, heavier than females, undermining a long-standing assumption.
- Health & Medicine
The U.S. now has a drug for severe frostbite. How does it work?
Iloprost has been shown to prevent the need to amputate frozen fingers and toes. It’s now approved for use to treat severe frostbite in the U.S.
- Animals
A decades-old mystery has been solved with the help of newfound bee species
Masked bees in Australia and French Polynesia have long-lost relatives in Fiji, suggesting that the bees’ ancestors island hopped.
- Health & Medicine
Four years on, the COVID-19 pandemic has a long tail of grief
Researchers are studying the magnitude and impact that grief from the COVID-19 pandemic has had and will have for years to come.
- Animals
Big monarch caterpillars don’t avoid toxic milkweed goo. They binge on it
Instead of nipping milkweed to drain the plants’ defensive sap, older monarch caterpillars may seek the toxic sap. Lab larvae guzzled it from a pipette.
- Life
This is the first egg-laying amphibian found to feed its babies ‘milk’
Similar to mammals, these ringed caecilians make a nutrient-rich milk-like fluid to feed their mewling hatchlings up to six times a day.
- Environment
How air pollution may make it harder for pollinators to find flowers
Certain air pollutants that build up at night can break down the same fragrance molecules that attract pollinators like hawk moths to primroses.
- Particle Physics
Forests might serve as enormous neutrino detectors
Trees could act as antennas that pick up radio waves of ultra-high energy neutrinos interactions, one physicist proposes.
- Space
Did the James Webb telescope ‘break the universe’? Maybe not
There’s no need for strange new physics to explain anomalously bright, massive galaxies seen by JWST, Hubble data suggest.
