Archaeology
Real-life adventure tale details search for legendary city
"The Lost City of the Monkey God" recounts archaeological expedition to uncover truth behind Honduras’ “White City" myth.
Featured Articles in this Issue
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Cover Story
With dinosaurs out of the way, mammals had a chance to thrive
The animals that lived through the great extinction event had a range of survival strategies to get them through.
Reviews & Previews
Science Visualized
Paleontology
Bony head ornaments signal some supersized dinosaurs
Bony headwear, like bumps and horns, is tied to bigger bodies in the theropod dinosaur family tree.
Notebook
Environment
Humans’ stuff vastly outweighs humans
The human-made technosphere weighs 30 trillion tons and surpasses the natural biosphere in mass and diversity, researchers estimate.
Features
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Some lucky birds escaped dino doomsday
Dino doomsday took out early birds too, but a lucky few survived.
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Devastation detectives try to solve dinosaur disappearance
Dinosaurs and others faced massive losses 66 million years ago from an asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or maybe a mix of the two.
More Stories from the February 4, 2017 issue
- Neuroscience
Pregnancy linked to long-term changes in mom’s brain
Pregnancy can sculpt a mother’s brain in a way that may help her tune in to her baby.
- Health & Medicine
New blood tests can detect prions
Blood tests may detect prion disease in people even before onset of symptoms.
- Life
Force-detecting protein senses when lungs fill with air
A study in mice pinpoints a force-detecting protein that regulates breathing, previously implicated in touch.
- Life
Ancient enzymes adapted to a cooler Earth to keep life’s chemical reactions going
Ancient enzymes kept their speed at lower temperatures.
- Ecosystems
Long-ignored, high-flying arthropods could make up largest land migrations
Forget birds. 3.5 trillion insects, spiders and mites a year fly over the southern United Kingdom.
- Chemistry
Carbon can exceed four-bond limit
Scientists confirm structure of unusual molecule in which carbon bonds to six other carbon atoms.
- Astronomy
Gotcha: Fast radio burst’s home nabbed
For the first time, astronomers pinpoint a precise position on the sky for a fast radio burst, revealing that the outburst originated in a galaxy about 2.5 billion light-years away.
- Archaeology
Hunter-gatherers were possibly first to call Tibetan Plateau home
Hunter-gatherers may have been Asia’s first year-round, high-altitude settlers.
- Paleontology
Tomatillo fossil is oldest nightshade plant
Two 52-million-year-old tomatillo fossils in Patagonia push the origin of nightshade plants back millions of years, to the time when dinosaurs roamed.
- Astronomy
Some pulsars lose their steady beat
Two pulsars spend most of their time switched off, hinting at a large population of part-time pulsars hiding in the Milky Way.
- Chemistry
Debate heats up over claims that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold
A team of chemists has a new explanation for the Mpemba effect, while other scientists debate if it is even real.
- Animals
Unusually loose skin helps hagfish survive shark attacks
Hagfish skin that easily slips and slides can be a lifesaver in crises such as shark attacks.
- Particle Physics
Dark matter still missing
The XENON100 experiment found no evidence of an annually varying dark matter signal.
- Astronomy
Earliest galaxies got the green light
Galaxies in the early universe might have emitted lots of green light, powered by large populations of stars much hotter than most found today.
- Astronomy
Milky Way’s black hole may hurl galactic spitballs our way
Gas blobs formed in the wake of stars shredded by the black hole in the center of the galaxy could pass within several hundred light-years of Earth on their way to intergalactic space.
- Computing
Retracted result on network equivalence reinstated
Graph isomorphism result still stands, despite error.
- Animals
It takes guts for a sea spider to pump blood
Most sea spiders have hearts, but what really gets their blood flowing are gut contractions.
- Life
Baby starfish on the hunt whip up whirlpools
Starfish larvae use hairlike cilia to stir up water whorls and suck prey in close.
- Health & Medicine
Ebola vaccine proves effective
The Ebola vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV proved effective at stopping the spread of the virus in a clinical trial in West Africa.
- Earth
Antarctic ice shelf heading toward collapse
A fast-growing crack in Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf could soon break off a 5,000-square-kilometer hunk of ice into the ocean.
- Health & Medicine
50 years ago, methadone made a rosy debut
Heralded as the “answer to heroin addiction,” methadone is still used to treat opiate addiction, despite risks.
- Animals
These acorn worms have a head for swimming
The larvae of one type of acorn worm are basically “swimming heads,” according to new genetic analyses.
