Mammals’ bodies outpaced their brains right after the dinosaurs died
Modern mammals are known for their big brains. But new analyses of mammal skulls from creatures that lived shortly after the dinosaur mass extinction...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
Here are the Top 10 times scientific imagination failed
Science, some would say, is an enterprise that should concern itself solely with cold, hard facts. Flights of imagination should be the province of...
North America’s oldest skull surgery dates to at least 3,000 years ago
A man with a hole in his forehead, who was interred in what’s now northwest Alabama between around 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, represents...
New images reveal details of two bacteria’s molecular syringes
Some bacteria carry tiny syringes filled with chemicals that may thin out competitors or incapacitate predators. Now, researchers have gotten up-close views of these...
Invasive jorō spiders get huge and flashy — if they’re female
Some thumbnail-sized, brown male spiders in Georgia could be miffed if they paid the least attention to humans and our news obsessions. Recent stories...
How scientists found an African bat lost to science for 40 years
Julius Nziza still remembers the moment vividly. Just before dawn on a chilly January morning in 2019, he and his team gently extracted a...
‘Vagina Obscura’ shows how little is known about female biology
Vagina ObscuraRachel E. GrossW.W. Norton & Co., $30 More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates, the Greek physician often considered the father of modern medicine,...
Wally Broecker divined how the climate could suddenly shift
It was the mid-1980s, at a meeting in Switzerland, when Wally Broecker’s ears perked up. Scientist Hans Oeschger was describing an ice core drilled...
Grainy ice cream is unpleasant. Plant-based nanocrystals might help
You can never have too much ice cream, but you can have too much ice in your ice cream. Adding plant-based nanocrystals to the...
Social mingling shapes how orangutans issue warning calls
Human language, in its many current forms, may owe an evolutionary debt to our distant ape ancestors who sounded off in groups of scattered...
A quantum computing feat brings the ‘megaquops’ era a step closer 
AI can give you your voice back 
As El Niño Returns, East Africa’s Urban Poor Brace for Heavy Rains 
Hunger is ‘an avoidable tragedy’ in a world of plenty: Türk