Today’s Children Face a Lifetime of Extreme Heat because of Climate Change Young people today will be exposed to a number of heat waves that no one would have experienced before the burning of fossil fuels started raising global temperatures By Celeste Biever & Nature magazine Many of today’s children will experience an ‘unprecedented life’…
How does intermittent fasting change the gut microbiome? Oliver Leedham/Alamy Stock Photo There is evidence that intermittent fasting alters the gut microbiome, and while this is often believed to improve gut health, some studies are now raising doubts about whether that is always the case. The idea behind intermittent fasting is relatively straightforward: instead of…
Grunts, barks, screams and pants ring through Taï National Park in Cȏte d’Ivoire. Chimpanzees there combine these different calls like linguistic Legos to relay complex meanings when communicating, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Chimps can combine and flexibly rearrange pairs of sounds to convey different ideas or meanings, an ability that investigators have…
Physicists Turn Lead into Gold—For a Fraction of a Second Scientists at Europe’s famous particle collider briefly created gold ions from lead in a modern twist on the alchemical goal By Elizabeth Gibney & Nature magazine LHC experiments don’t create large gold nuggets — but some particles within a beam of lead ions can turn…
A composite image of the remnant of Kepler’s Supernova NASA/CXC/SAO/D.Patnaude One of the most famous exploding stars ever recorded by humanity may have been an invader from another galaxy, according to a new analysis of its movements. What is more, alien stars like this might be behind 1 per cent of all the supernovae we…
Neandertals formed sophisticated hunting parties that drove wild horses into fatal traps around 200,000 years ago. At Germany’s Schöningen site, wooden spears, double-pointed sticks, stone artifacts and butchered remains of more than 50 horses of various ages are some 100,000 years younger than previously thought, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Excavations of this…
CLIMATEWIRE | When the McBride wildfire erupted in New Mexico three years ago, David Merritt had a math problem. The fire was closing in on a Lincoln County hospital with 11 admitted patients, but the ambulance drivers who would normally evacuate those patients were busy fighting the blaze. High winds ruled out air evacuations. There…
“Have you ever seen a fungus move in real life?” Episode 2 of the new season of The Last of Us HBO There was something I loved and something I hated in the first season of The Last of Us, the post-apocalyptic TV show based on the hit video game of the same name, in…
Not all cell walls are created equal. Take the peculiar makeup of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium’s cell wall. It might play a role in lingering symptoms of Lyme disease — the most common tick-borne infection in the United States. That makeup might also be key to developing new treatments for the disease, researchers report in…
If you’ve been reading this column lately, you might have noticed a recent trend where I try to answer some deceptively simple questions: What is a planet? What is a moon? What is a star? A recurring theme here is that it’s hard to define such terms because definitions are, well, definite, while nature is…
