Left: The remains of a middle-aged woman at the Liyupo site in southern China, who was smoke-dried prior to burial about 8000 years ago. Right: A modern smoke-dried mummy of the Dani people in West Papua, Indonesia Zhen Li, Hirofumi Matsumura, Hsiao-chun Hung Human bodies carefully preserved by smoking up to 14,000 years ago have…
Southeast Asians created the oldest known human mummies roughly 7,000 years before Egyptian mummies debuted, researchers say. From around 12,000 to 4,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers across southern China, Southeast Asia and islands to the south and east bound the dead in crouched postures. They then slowly dried the bodies over smoky, low-temperature fires for several…
September 15, 2025 4 min read Our Body Clock Might Prefer Permanent Standard Time A new study suggests that permanent standard time may reduce obesity and stroke By Humberto Basilio edited by Lauren J. Young Winding clocks an hour back this fall, when daylight saving time ends for the year across much of the U.S.,…
Chamkaur Ghag is one of the leaders of the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, a peerlessly sensitive dark matter detector Nova Deep underground in the middle of South Dakota, the most sensitive dark matter detector on Earth sits quietly waiting. This is the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, the central part of which is a large tank of liquid xenon….
Salt, ice and some oomph — these three simple ingredients are all that’s needed to make waste-free electricity, researchers report September 15 in Nature Materials. Straining a single cone-shaped piece of ice that’s slightly smaller than a black peppercorn and 25 percent salt by weight can output about 1 millivolt, while an array of 2,000…
For decades the term “Monday blues” has been shorthand for the collective groan that greets the start of each workweek. It’s also well documented in medical statistics. Mondays come with higher rates of anxiety, stress and even suicide compared with other days. Studies on the phenomenon across whole countries have found a 19 percent increase…
Drones have become a key part of the Russia-Ukraine war Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images A stealthy military radio that hides communications in background noise is extremely difficult to jam or locate, meaning that it could allow drone pilots to operate without detection. Electronic warfare has entered an intense new phase as drones increasingly…
Astronomy is the oldest science, and the sky is among our first laboratories. Long before the written word, people erected stone circles to frame the first dawn rays of the summer solstice, etched lunar calendars in bone and wove the planets into their myths. Eventually, we learned to measure the heavens, and in the 16th…
This episode was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American‘s board of editors. Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup, where we dive into some of the headlines you might have missed last week. We’ll…
Feeling anxious? Can’t concentrate at work? Wake up drenched in sweat? Welcome to the overlooked and often maddening world of the perimenopause. This transitional phase, in which symptoms of the menopause are experienced but periods haven’t yet stopped, was once dismissed as a hormonal blip. Now, it is increasingly recognised as an often unpleasant and…
