Before Pangaea — What? — Science News, September 30, 1972 The continents as we know them resulted when the protocontinent Pangaea broke apart and its fragments made the long slow journey to their present positions. The process took about 200 million years. But the Earth’s crust is an estimated 4.5 billion years old.… [Scientists are exploring]
For some ant queens, the secret to long life might be a self-produced insulin blocker. Ant queens are famously long-lived, even though they shouldn’t be. Generally, animals that put lots of energy into reproduction sacrifice some time off their life. But ant queens produce millions of eggs and live an extraordinarily long time compared with
Lionfish certainly aren’t the fastest predators on the reef, but new research suggests that they can catch swift prey through pure tenacity, gliding slowly in pursuit until the perfect moment to strike. The finding may help explain part of the lionfish’s impact as an invasive species, and reveal a key hunting strategy that other relatively
Widespread volcanic eruptions around 202 million years ago had a profound effect on Earth’s climate, triggering a mass extinction event that killed off three-fourths of the planet’s species, including many large reptiles. Yet dinosaurs, somehow, survived and went on to thrive. Dinosaurs are often thought of as heat-loving, well suited to the steamy greenhouse environment
A flexible electronic implant could one day make pain management a lot more chill. Created from materials that dissolve in the body, the device encircles nerves with an evaporative cooler. Implanted in rats, the cooler blocked pain signals from zipping up to the brain, bioengineer John Rogers and colleagues report in the July 1 Science.
In the 1920s, laborers and amateur archaeologists at gravel quarry pits in southeastern England uncovered more than 300 ancient, sharp-edged oval tools. Researchers have long suspected that these hand axes were made 500,000 to 700,000 years ago. A new study confirms that suspicion in the first systematic excavation of the site, known as Fordwich. Dating
On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. By undoing the landmark 1973 decision that protected a person’s right to an abortion, the highest court in the country has shifted decisions about this medical care to individual state and local governments. Some states have already passed laws that curtail abortion access. Now
By now, wheat planted late last year waves in fields across Ukraine. Spring crops of sunflowers and barley are turning swaths of dark earth into a fuzz of bright green. But with Russia’s war being waged in some of the most fertile regions of Ukraine, uncertainty looms over summer harvesting. Ukrainian farmers braved a war
PASADENA, Calif. — The faint dwarf galaxies in a nearby galaxy group seem to have missed the memo. Instead of being dispersed evenly around the group’s most massive galaxy, which is what happens in our own galaxy group, these newly found dwarfs cluster in one region. And astronomers don’t know why. “This satellite distribution is…
Smoke rings are being seen in a new light. Doughnut-shaped structures called vortex rings are sometimes seen swirling through fluids. Smokers can form them with their mouths, volcanoes can spit them out during eruptions and dolphins can blow them as bubble rings. Now, scientists can create the rings with light. A standard vortex is an…
Machine learning can get a boost from quantum physics. On certain types of machine learning tasks, quantum computers have an exponential advantage over standard computation, scientists report in the June 10 Science. The researchers proved that, according to quantum math, the advantage applies when using machine learning to understand quantum systems. And the team showed…
It turns out that chicken and rice may have always gone together, from the birds’ initial domestication to tonight’s dinner. In two new studies, scientists lay out a potential story of chicken’s origins. This poultry tale begins surprisingly recently in rice fields planted by Southeast Asian farmers around 3,500 years ago, zooarchaeologist Joris Peters and…