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  1. Earth

    Manifest dirt

    Nineteenth-century settlers left a dusty mark on the West. Rocky Mountain lake deposits reveal that America’s westward expansion kicked huge amounts of dirt into the air—probably from livestock grazing. A team led by Jason Neff, a biogeochemist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, examined soil cores from the beds of tiny mountain lakes in […]

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  2. Eau de fruit fly

    A single scent moves female fruit files to swoon and males to flee. The difference, new research shows, is in the brain’s wiring. Male flies on the prowl put out a pheromone called cis-vaccenyl acetate (cVA) that both sexes detect with scent-sensing cells on their antennae. To explain how cVA prompts such different reactions in […]

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  3. Paleontology

    Twice upon a Time

    New fossil finds suggest that the complex features of mammals originated earlier than previously thought and might even have evolved independently in different mammalian lineages.