Our grasp of food allergy science is as jumbled as a can of mixed nuts. While there are tantalizing clues on how food allergies emerge and might be prevented, misconceptions are plentiful and broad conclusions are lacking, concludes a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. As a result, both the […]
The first normally solitary spider to win Dad of the Year sets up housekeeping in a web above his offspring and often ends up as their sole defender and single parent. Moms handle most parental care known in spiders, says Rafael Rios Moura at the Federal University of Uberlândia in Brazil. But either or both […]
To create a heavy black hole, it might help to start with a massive magnetic star. Strong magnetic fields could help stem the flow of gas from a heavyweight star, leaving behind enough material to form hefty black holes, a new study suggests. A pair of such magnetic stars could be responsible for giving birth […]
A robot caterpillar can use squishy legs to sense the world. Roboticist Takuya Umedachi and colleagues designed the robot after studying real-life caterpillars. These insects can “bend, wrinkle, buckle, twist, droop, and creep” their way through the environment, and they do it “without massively complex brains,” the researchers write December 7 in Royal Society Open […]
A seahorse’s genetic instruction book is giving biologists a few insights into the creature’s odd physical features and rare parenting style. Researchers decoded a male tiger tail seahorse’s (Hippocampus comes) genome and compared it to the genomes of other seahorses and ray-finned fishes. The analysis revealed a bevy of missing genes and other genetic elements […]
Famous footprints of nearly 3.7-million-year-old hominids, found in 1976 at Tanzania’s Laetoli site, now have sizable new neighbors. While excavating small pits in 2015 to evaluate the impact of a proposed field museum at Laetoli, researchers uncovered comparably ancient hominid footprints about 150 meters from the original discoveries. The new finds reveal a vast range […]
A baby starfish scoops up snacks by spinning miniature whirlpools. These vortices catch tasty algae and draw them close so the larva can slurp them up, scientists from Stanford University report December 19 in Nature Physics. Before starfish take on their familiar shape, they freely swim ocean waters as millimeter-sized larvae. To swim around on […]
People hunted and foraged year-round in the thin air of China’s Tibetan Plateau at least 7,400 to 8,400 years ago, a new study suggests. And permanent settlers of the high-altitude region might even have arrived as early as 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. Three lines of dating evidence indicate that humans occupied the central Tibetan […]
The part of the brain that governs emotions such as fear and anxiety also helps mice hunt. That structure, the amygdala, orchestrates a mouse’s ability to both stalk a cricket and deliver a fatal bite, scientists report January 12 in Cell. Scientists made select nerve cells in mice’s brains sensitive to light, and then used […]
The sun has been in the same routine for at least 290 million years, new research suggests. Ancient tree rings from the Permian period record a roughly 11-year cycle of wet and dry periods, climate fluctuations caused by the ebbing and flowing of solar activity, researchers propose January 9 in Geology. The discovery would push […]