McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News.
Lillyth Quillan knew almost immediately that something was wrong with her baby. At around eight months old with eight sharp new teeth, he began deliberately biting her breast as she fed him, then looking her in the eyes and laughing. Even though she cried out and pulled him away for significant stretches of time, whenever…
There are things we can do to prevent nightmares, such as not watching scary movies Andrii Lysenko/Getty Images Having nightmares on a weekly basis seems to accelerate ageing – and could even triple the risk of early death. “People who have more frequent nightmares age faster and die earlier,” says Abidemi Otaiku at Imperial College…
First Near-Complete Denisovan Skull Reveals What This Ancient Human Cousin Looked Like A Denisovan skull has been identified for the first time. The find was based on proteins and calcified dental plaque By Dyani Lewis & Nature magazine A reconstruction of the hominin source of the ‘Dragon Man’ cranium in his habitat. The fossil has…
The US humorist Christopher Morley once described the human body as “an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing”. He wasn’t wrong: from our cardiovascular and lymphatic systems to our guts and urinary tract, a large proportion of our internal anatomy is dedicated to moving fluids around. Perhaps the most impressive piece of plumbing is the gastrointestinal…
Can Tesla’s Cybercab Share the Road with America’s Myth of the Highway? For more than a century, cars have meant freedom, escape and self-reinvention to Americans. Now Tesla’s forthcoming Cybercab makes us ask whether we can have the romance of the open road without actually driving it By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Dean Visser…
Giant pink sea star larvae resumed their development after being frozen at -200°C Patrick Webster For the first time, scientists have successfully cryopreserved sea star larvae and reactivated them – an important milestone that could help re-establish a critically endangered keystone species. Beginning in 2013, sea star wasting syndrome spread along the west coast of…
Seeking Sustainable Fashion and Cracking a Greenland Mystery Inside this double issue of SciAm, you’ll find black holes that burp up their stellar meals, metal detectorists that hit pay dirt, hope for psychopathy, the truth about testosterone and a consumer guide to sustainable clothes shopping By Jeanna Bryner Scientific American, July/August 2025 Sometimes I joke…
Hominin cranium from Harbin, China, now identified as a Denisovan Hebei GEO University The Denisovans, a mysterious group of ancient humans originally identified purely from DNA, finally have a face. Using molecular evidence, Qiaomei Fu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and her colleagues have confirmed what many researchers suspected: that…
Rob, 42, is a fitness guy. He loves working out, spends his spare time in the jujitsu gym and eats a high-protein diet heavy on avocado oil. He cares about his health and wants to optimize it, and a lot of the social media influencers he follows are the same. So a few years back,…
