Like an interplanetary parfait, the dwarf planet Ceres appears to have layers. A pliable outer shell of minerals, ices and salts encapsulates a core of solid rock, a new study suggests. This first peek inside Ceres — courtesy of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft — can help researchers explain some mysteries on the surface and provide insight […]
New investigations of England’s infamously fraudulent Piltdown Man fossils reveal a mix of clever and clumsy methods used by one man to fool early 20th century scientists for 40 years. Lawyer and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson modified orangutan and human bones to resemble what scientists of the time anticipated a “missing link” between apes and […]
Primates may have some high-flying relatives. Colugos, small mammals that glide from treetop to treetop in forests throughout Southeast Asia, have an evolutionary history that’s long been debated. Their teeth look similar to tree shrews’ teeth, while other skull and genetic features resemble those of primates. (Past studies have even linked colugos to bats and […]
A large study of human genetic variation finds more than 7 million spots where one person’s DNA can differ from another’s. Analyses of such variants, compiled from cataloging the genes from more than 60,000 people, are already offering doctors helpful insights into diseases such as schizophrenia and some heart conditions. Researchers from the Exome Aggregation […]
COLUMBIA, Mo. — If you find a daddy longlegs in your house, don’t be scared. “Daddy longlegs are actually pretty docile animals when it comes to interacting with humans,” says evolutionary biologist Kasey Fowler-Finn, who studies the arachnids at St. Louis University. Specifically, she studies daddy longlegs sex. She is using this common group of […]
Over the last several years, spacecraft have beamed back images from all across the solar system, revealing a complex tapestry of landscapes. Dust shapes the scenery on comet 67P, whereas ice rules on Pluto and the moons of Saturn. At first glance, many of these terrains seem the same — mountains, craters and canyons show […]
Bonobos — chimpanzees’ sister species — don’t get the credit they deserve as tool users. Bonobos in a sanctuary’s protected forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo crack nuts with stones nearly as well as wild chimps in other parts of Africa do, researchers report online August 26 in the American Journal of Primatology. Wild […]
Genetic surgery is far away for humans — Optimism concerning application of genetic experiments to improve mankind is unwarranted now, a Canadian pediatrician told the Third International Congress of Human Genetics meeting in Chicago…. Although striking and sometimes controversial experiments in genetic surgery have in fact been performed in multicellular systems, he explained, public demand […]
Inside a large cave in northwestern Australia’s remote Kimberley region, someone painted an elongated, yamlike shape on a ceiling at least 16,000 years ago, new research suggests. That long-ago creation in the unnamed cavern adds fuel to the argument that rock art in Australia goes back even earlier to the continent’s first inhabitants, researchers contend. […]
Cosmic mismatchResearchers used supernovas, cosmic microwave background radiation and patterns of galaxy clusters to measure the Hubble constant — the rate at which the universe expands — but their results were mismatched, Emily Conover reported in “Debate persists on cosmic expansion” (SN: 8/6/16, p. 10). Reader J.R. Kennedy thought that light-dimming space dust and debris might explain the discrepancy. […]