It is early morning on a wide plain in Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. With a small Dixie cup and a wooden tongue depressor, Susan Alberts picks up a fecal sample left by a female baboon named Yoruba.
Alberts is an eminent primatologist. She is both the chair of the department of evolutionary anthropology and a member of the biology department at Duke University, and the co-director of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. But this morning, …
A human’s genes are laid down at
conception. A fetus’ heart, brain and other organs start to form five weeks later.
At six months, an unborn child has most of its body parts. But there is one
essential component missing: the helpful bacteria, often referred to as the microbiome,
that will inhabit its gut, skin and other organs.
Our first interactions with microbes set the stage for health throughout our lives. Babies’ microbiomes have been linked …
The image shows the first image acquired by the DLR-developed MASCAM camera system during Hayabusa2’s descent, shortly after separation from the landing module at a height of 41 meters. (Credit: Jaumann et al., Science (2019))
The solar system is a crowded place. Earth may be the only planet with humans on it, but many worlds are home to robots — rovers and landers and orbiters, gathering data for astronomers. Asteroid (162173) Ryugu joined them last summer, and has been playing host to th …
These color-coded maps of the brain show the semantic similarities during listening (top) and reading (bottom). (Credit: Fatma Deniz)
If you don’t have time to sit and read a physical book, is listening to the audio version considered cheating? To some hardcore book nerds, it could be. But new evidence suggests that, to our brains, reading and hearing a story might not be so different.
In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley s …
The new crater lake at Kīlauea’s summit, spotted on August 15, 2019. M. Patrick, USGS-HVO
Over the last few weeks, we’ve had two newsworthy events that involve volcanoes and water. This is a common combination on our planet and can have dramatically different results. One is a very small feature that’s new to one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. The other is now a large feature spreading across the Pacific that came from a previously unknown volcano under the sea.
Does alcohol cause cancer? Here’s what recent research tells us. (Credit: Mateone/Shutterstock)
Humans and the bottle go a long way back. Archaeologists have found our love of alcohol began some 9,000 years ago (and maybe even 10 million years ago, according to some reports).
Evidence of people boozin’ it up has been found in nearly every society throughout history. And today, alcohol is still ingrained in cultures around the world, especially in places like the Midwest – dubbed the B …
An artist’s illustration of a neutron star, a proposed source for fast radio bursts. (Credit: Casey Reed – Penn State University/Wikimedia Commons)
Fast radio bursts are one of the most puzzling phenomena in
astrophysics. But a new discovery of eight new sources for them might help
scientists figure out what’s causing these intense outbursts of energy coming
from distant galaxies.
The newly discovered bursts are from repeating sources,
meaning they were observed to burst multiple times. …
GJ 1061 is a cool red dwarf similar to the star TRAPPIST-1. This artist’s concept imagines a view from the surface of one of TRAPPIST-1’s multiple exoplanets. (Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO)
There is a triplet of Earth-sized planet candidates orbiting
a star just 12 light-years away, a new study has found. And one appears to be
in the habitable zone.
All three candidates are thought to be at least 1.4 to 1.8
times the mass of Earth, and orbit the star every three to 13 days, which would
put …
The world of wine is complex. But there are a few simple things you can do to up your skills. (Credit: nd3000/Shutterstock)
Only 256 people in the world can call themselves Master Sommeliers: experts at tasting, describing and selling wine. They’re so rare because each sip of wine is a perceptual puzzle: Over 25 different taste and smell variables (sweetness, acidity, texture, finish, etc.) define each wine.
But you don’t have to be a super-taster or super-smeller to become a wine ex …
By
Craig Anderson, University of Glasgow |
August 21, 2019 10:47 am
One Polish town has seen an unlikely string of female births stretching for nearly a decade. (Credit: Omar Lopez/Unsplash)
The tiny Polish village of Miejsce Odrzanskie has become the unlikely source of international media attention over the past fortnight as a result of what the New York Times called “a strange population anomaly”. It has now been almost a decade since the last boy was born in this place, with the most recent 12 babies all having been girls.
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