AUSTIN, TEXAS — Success of an indoor spraying campaign to combat malaria on an African island may have started a worrisome trend in local mosquito evolution. Since 2004, using pesticides inside homes has eradicated two of four malaria-spreading Anopheles mosquitoes on Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea, vector biologist Jacob I. Meyers of Texas A&M University […]
Bottoms up, from the distant past. Thanks to a new method of analyzing the chemicals in liquids absorbed by clay containers, researchers have uncorked the oldest solid evidence of grape-based wine making in Europe, and possibly the world, at a site in northern Greece. Chemical markers of red wine were embedded in two pieces of […]
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 […]
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 […]
On astrophysicists’ charts of star stuff, there’s a substance that still merits the label “here be dragons.” That poorly understood material is found inside neutron stars — the collapsed remnants of once-mighty stars — and is now being mapped out, as scientists better characterize the weird matter. The detection of two colliding neutron stars, announced […]
Galileo’s most famous experiment has taken a trip to outer space. The result? Einstein was right yet again. The experiment confirms a tenet of Einstein’s theory of gravity with greater precision than ever before. According to science lore, Galileo dropped two balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that they fell at the […]
Nature may have a few things to teach tennis players about backspin. The hairyflower wild petunia (Ruellia ciliatiflora) shoots seeds that spin up to 1,660 times per second, which helps them fly farther, researchers report March 7 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. These seeds have the fastest known rotations of any plant or […]
Meet STEVE, a newfound type of aurora that drapes the sky with a mauve ribbon and bedazzling green bling. This feature of the northern lights, recently photographed and named by citizen scientists in Canada, now has a scientific explanation. The streak of color, which appears to the south of the main aurora, may be a […]