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 […]
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. […]
PASADENA, Calif. — The forecast on Pluto is clear with less than a 1 percent chance of clouds. Images from the New Horizons spacecraft show hints of what could be a few isolated clouds scattered around the dwarf planet, the first seen in otherwise clear skies. Seven cloud candidates appear to hug the ground in […]
It’s a familiar sight: Your mom or grandmother picks up a document and immediately holds it out at arm’s length to make out the small letters on the page, while simultaneously reaching for her reading glasses. As people age, their ability to see things close up often fades, a condition known as presbyopia. The eye […]
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 […]
This stone engraving of an aurochs, or wild cow, found in a French rock-shelter in 2012, provides glimpses of an ancient human culture’s spread across Central and Western Europe, researchers say. Rows of dots partly cover the aurochs. A circular depression cut into the center of the animal’s body may have caused the limestone to […]
In recent years, rates of colorectal cancer cases and deaths in the United States rose among young and middle-aged adults, an American Cancer Society study of colorectal cancer trends between 2000 and 2014 finds. That increase came even as rates of colon and rectal tumors and deaths dropped in people 50 and older, researchers report […]
Mars may have had a far-out birthplace. Simulating the assembly of the solar system around 4.56 billion years ago, researchers propose that the Red Planet didn’t form in the inner solar system alongside the other terrestrial planets as previously thought. Mars instead may have formed around where the asteroid belt is now and migrated inward […]
Even though a sprained ankle rarely needs an opioid, a new study of emergency room patients found that about 7 percent of patients got sent home with a prescription for the potentially addictive painkiller anyway. And the more pills prescribed, the greater the chance the prescription would be refilled, raising concerns about continued use. The […]
The company mice keep can change their behavior. In some ways, genetically normal littermates behave like mice that carry an autism-related mutation, despite not having the mutation themselves, scientists report. The results, published July 31 in eNeuro, suggest that the social environment influences behavior in complex and important ways, says neuroscientist Alice Luo Clayton of […]