Saturn serves up the closest thing to space pasta, the latest round of images from NASA’s Cassini probe, released March 9, show. On March 7, the spacecraft snapped a series of portraits of Pan, Saturn’s small moon that orbits within a 325-kilometer gap in one of the planet’s rings. Taken at a distance of 24,572 […]
Physicists have snagged a bounty of five new particles in one go. Members of the LHCb experiment, located at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, reported the prolific particle procurement in a paper posted online March 14 at arXiv.org. The five particles are each composed of three quarks — a class of particle that makes […]
Nomadic warriors and herders known as the Huns are described in historical accounts as having instigated the fifth century fall of the Roman Empire under Attila’s leadership. But the invaders weren’t always so fierce. Sometimes they shared rather than fought with the Romans, new evidence suggests. Huns and farmers living around the Roman Empire’s eastern […]
Most visitors to a large natural history museum don’t know it, but they are only scratching the surface of the museum’s holdings, even if they check out every exhibition. Most of the scientific treasures are tucked away in collection rooms filled with millions of specimens, which scientists use in their research. The Field Museum in […]
A common and usually harmless virus may trigger celiac disease. Infection with the suspected culprit, a reovirus, could cause the immune system to react to gluten as if it was a dangerous pathogen instead of a harmless food protein, an international team of researchers reports April 7 in Science. In a study in mice, the […]
Some Pakistani people are real knockouts, a new DNA study finds. Knockouts in this sense doesn’t refer to boxing or a stunning appearance, but to natural mutations that inactivate, or “knock out” certain genes. The study suggests that human knockouts could prove valuable evidence for understanding how genes work and for developing drugs. Among 10,503 […]
The Arctic Ocean is a final resting place for plastic debris dumped into the North Atlantic Ocean, new research suggests. A 2013 circumpolar expedition discovered hundreds of tons of plastic debris, from fishing lines to plastic films, ecologist Andrés Cózar of the University of Cádiz in Spain and colleagues report April 19 in Science Advances. […]
The March for Science, Washington, D.C. — On April 22, 2017 — Earth Day — thousands of scientists, science advocates and general enthusiasts rallied on the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., at the first-ever March for Science. The organizers estimate that over 600 sister marches also occurred around the world. The march […]
DNA from 2,000-year-old stallions is helping rewrite the story of horse domestication. Ancient domesticated horses had much more genetic diversity than their present-day descendants do, researchers report in the April 28 Science. In particular, these ancient horses had many more varieties of Y chromosomes and fewer harmful mutations than horses do now. Previous studies based […]
Chemical transformations in minerals deep beneath the seafloor could explain why Indonesia’s 2004 mega-earthquake was unexpectedly destructive, researchers report in the May 26 Science. The magnitude 9.2 quake and the tsunami that it triggered killed more than 250,000 people, flattened villages, and swept homes out to sea across Southeast Asia. It was one of the […]