Thawing permafrost driven by climate change could free trapped microbes and radioactive material. As climate change warms the Arctic, melting ice could release hazardous chemicals and radioactive material dating to the Cold War. Vanishing permafrost could also free viruses and bacteria that have slumbered beneath Arctic ice for tens ofContinue Reading
You’ve heard of disappearing ink. Now get ready for suddenly appearing ink. Using a clear liquid, researchers can print a full rainbow of colors on transparent surfaces. The trick is printing the liquid in precise, microscale patterns that create structural color. Structural colors arise from the way different wavelengths ofContinue Reading
An angel shark has never been filmed in this part of the world before. A young shark glides to the ocean floor, slaps the sandy ground with its head and disappears in a cloud of dust. A pause. A small fish swims by. And then… SNAP! The fish doesn’t knowContinue Reading
It was nearly 30 feet long. About 90 million years ago, a gigantic apex predator — a meat-eating dinosaur with serrated shark-like teeth — prowled what is now Uzbekistan, according to a new study of the behemoth’s jawbone. The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making itContinue Reading
Climate change is not only a human problem; animals have to adapt to it as well. Some “warm-blooded” animals are shapeshifting and getting larger beaks, legs, and ears to better regulate their body temperatures as the planet gets hotter. Bird researcher Sara Ryding of Deakin University in Australia describes theseContinue Reading
Ordinary human dilemmas are tougher to solve than the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics\ As a boy, I was a rock hound, and I learned how to identify minerals with the Mohs hardness test, named after the mineralogist who invented it. You take a known specimen, like quartz,Continue Reading
When Decio Eizirik began treating patients with type 1 diabetes in the 1980s, he was pretty sure about what was behind the disease: an immune system gone haywire. People with the illness lacked insulin, a crucial hormone, because beta cells in the pancreas—the body’s insulin factories—were being attacked and destroyedContinue Reading
Self-targeting antibodies attack part of the immune system that plays a key role in fighting infection Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies,Continue Reading
Spend any time around a baby and you’re likely to hear some babbling. Now, new research shows baby bats can do it too. A paper published on Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science finds similarities between the babbling of human infants and the babbling of the greaterContinue Reading
Spend any time around a baby and you’re likely to hear some babbling. Now, new research shows baby bats can do it too. A paper published on Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science finds similarities between the babbling of human infants and the babbling of the greaterContinue Reading