News
- Archaeology
Mysterious marks on Ice Age cave art may have been a form of record keeping
Hunter-gatherers during the Ice Age may have recorded when prey mated and gave birth, suggesting that these people possessed complex cognitive skills
- Life
Birds that dive may be at greater risk of extinction
For birds, a diving lifestyle seems irreversible, evolutionarily speaking. The inflexibility possibly increases diving birds’ chances of going extinct.
- Life
Fossils suggest early primates lived in a once-swampy Arctic
Teeth and jawbones found on Ellesmere Island, Canada, suggest that two early primate species migrated there 52 million years ago.
- Materials Science
These shape-shifting devices melt and re-form thanks to magnetic fields
Miniature machines made of gallium embedded with magnetic particles can switch between solid and liquid states.
- Health & Medicine
Procrastination may harm your health. Here’s what you can do
Scientists have tied procrastination to mental and physical health problems. But don't panic if you haven't started your New Year's resolutions yet.
- Astronomy
Lots of Tatooine-like planets around binary stars may be habitable
A new simulation suggests that planets orbiting a pair of stars may be plentiful, and many of those worlds could be suitable for life.
- Paleontology
A bird with a T. rex head may help reveal how dinosaurs became birds
The 120-million-year-old Cratonavis zhui, newly discovered in China, had a head like a theropod and body like a modern bird.
- Earth
Earth’s inner core may be reversing its rotation
In the past 13 years, the rotation of the planet’s solid inner core may have temporarily stopped and then started to reverse direction.
- Animals
A rare rabbit plays an important ecological role by spreading seeds
Rabbits aren’t thought of as seed dispersers, but the Amami rabbit of Japan has now been recorded munching on a plant’s seeds and pooping them out.
- Environment
Rare earth elements could be pulled from coal waste
The scheme would provide valuable rare earth metals and help clean up coal mining’s dirty legacy.
- Astronomy
New data show how quickly light pollution is obscuring the night sky
Tens of thousands of observations from citizen scientists spanning a decade show that the night sky is getting about 10 percent brighter every year.
- Animals
Chicken DNA is replacing the genetics of their ancestral jungle fowl
Up to half of modern jungle fowl genes have been inherited from domesticated chickens. That could threaten the wild birds’ long-term survival.
