The ghost catfish transforms from glassy to glam when white light passes through its mostly transparent body. Now, scientists know why. The fish’s iridescence comes from light bending as it travels through microscopic striped structures in the animal’s muscles, researchers report March 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many fishes with […]

DNA from a 9,000-year-old baby tooth from Alaska, the oldest natural mummy in North America and remains of ancient Brazilians is helping researchers trace the steps of ancient people as they settled the Americas. Two new studies give a more detailed and complicated picture of the peopling of the Americas than ever before presented. People […]

Disinfection of public drinking water is one of the great public health success stories of the 20th century. In 1900, outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, both caused by waterborne bacteria, were common in American cities. In 1908, Jersey City, N.J., became the first U.S. city to routinely disinfect community water. Other cities and towns quickly […]

An orbital oopsie has led to new proof of Albert Einstein’s physics prowess. In 2014, two satellites intended for Europe’s Galileo network, the equivalent of the United States’ GPS network, were placed into orbit incorrectly, causing them to travel around Earth in ellipses rather than circles. That wasn’t ideal for the satellites’ originally intended navigational […]

SEATTLE — Astronomers have spotted a second repeating fast radio burst, and it looks a lot like the first. The existence of a second repeating burst suggests there could be many more of the mysterious signals in the cosmos. The burst, called FRB 180814.J0422+73, is one of 13 newly discovered fast radio bursts, or FRBs […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Seizures during sleep can scramble memories — a preliminary finding that may help explain why people with epilepsy sometimes have trouble remembering. The sleeping brain normally rehashes newly learned material, a nocturnal rehearsal that strengthens those memories. Neuroscientist Jessica Creery and her colleagues forced this rehearsal by playing certain sounds while nine […]

Just beyond the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula lies an iceberg graveyard. There, in the Scotia Sea, many of the icebergs escaping from Antarctica begin to melt, depositing sediment from the continent that had been trapped in the ice onto the seafloor. Now, a team of researchers has embarked on a two-month expedition to excavate […]

Black holes have been beguiling from the very beginning. Hinted at as early as the 1780s and predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they didn’t get the name we know today until the 1960s. Bizarre beasts that squash gobs of matter into infinitely dense abysses, black holes were once thought to be merely a […]

A surprise ingredient may explain how lemon juice puts the squeeze on kidney stones. Lemons contain nanoparticles that, when fed to rats, block stone formation, scientists report in the Feb. 22 Nano Letters. If the tiny sacs do the same for humans, the nanoparticles might one day offer a way to prevent kidney stones in […]