(Credit: Shutterstock) Chinese scientists say they’ve found a way to take some of the sizzle out of our bacon. Though that sounds worrying, it was actually done with the pigs’ health in mind. Pigs are so notoriously porky in part because they lack a gene, UCP1, that helps burn fat to generate heat. The result is plumper pigs, but it also poses an increased risk for newborns that can die if they’re not kept warm enough. Porky No More With the gene-editing technology ...read more

Can you tell if this monkey’s depressed or not? Don’t be so sure. (Credit: By Lorna Roberts/Shutterstock) Anxiety and depression have become something of a modern plague, with the NIH estimating that some 16 million adults in the US experienced at least one major depressive episode in 2015. For young people, rates of depression are even higher, and they appear to be getting worse still. To get a handle on illness, researchers often turn to animal models, and depression and anxiety ...read more

The Aitape skull was discovered in Papua New Guinea in 1929, and researchers say it has revealed that the person most likely died in a catastrophic tsunami. (Credit: Arthur Durband) Tsunamis have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the past two decades. Now a new study finds that a 6,000-year-old skull may come from the earliest known victim of these killer waves. The partial human skull was discovered in 1929 buried in a mangrove swamp outside the small town of Aitape Papua New Guinea, ...read more

Known so far only from its giant footprints, a new Southern African mega-carnivore is believed to be the region’s largest dinosaur predator ever. (Credit Fabian Knoll and Lara Sciscio) My, what big feet you have…200-million-year-old dinosaur footprints found in the mountainous Southern African country of Lesotho are unique within the Southern Hemisphere and the largest of their kind ever discovered on the continent. But size isn’t the only thing that matters about the mega-ca ...read more

(Credit: Liya Graphics/Shutterstock) The human genome is composed of some 3 billion base pairs, the individual molecules that compose our DNA. A mutation to just a single base pair can have dramatic consequences if it occurs in certain locations. Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and more are caused by point mutations, or aberrations in just a single letter of our DNA. Those letters, A, T, C and G, represent the four molecules, or nucleotides, that comprise the alphabet of ...read more

Editor’s Note: Today starts the beginning of Bat Week and there are many opportunities for citizen scientists to get involved. Below, we have reposted an article from 2015 on the popular online project Bat Detective. Want to support more bat projects? Check out SciStarter to find a list of fun possibilities.  by Kristin Butler About fifteen of us were gathered in a classroom one Thursday evening last month on San Francisco’s South Bay. We were there to hear a talk as part ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Many forces shape the planet’s rugged features: wind, water, fire, and, of course, salmon sex. That’s the conclusion from Washington State University researcher Alex Fremier and colleagues in a study that’s billed as one of the first attempts to quantify the earth-shaping power of spawning salmon. They titled their study, in part, “Sex That Moves Mountains,” and it’s a new take on the ways living things transform habitats. Take Me to t ...read more

I’ve spent the last few days at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Seattle. What I’ve learned is that geology has definitely left the planet and there are some great questions and locations for studying geologic problems on other planets in our solar system. This got me thinking about some of my favorite geologic sites in the solar system. Some of them are like features on Earth, others are like terrestrial deposits on steroids and others are like nothing we can find ...read more

Jane Goodall at Gombe with Hugo van Lawick and his omnipresent camera. (Credit: Jane Goodall Institute) During the 1960s, humanity’s place in the universe changed dramatically as Soviet and American astronauts ventured off the planet and (for the Yanks, at least) onto the surface of the Moon. During those same years, humanity’s place on Earth changed rather dramatically, too, as scientists took a closer look at our primate relatives and discovered that they are a lot more like us&n ...read more

Never fear, self-driving snowplows are here. (Credit: Daimler, Mercedes-Benz ) We hate to break it to you, but winter is coming. And with winter comes snow, which tends to spoil people’s travel plans. But a group of self-driving snowplows could clear the tarmac faster and more efficiently, helping make winter-weather delays a thing of the past. Four autonomous Mercedes-Benz Arocs tractor’s recently hit the the tarmac at a former airbase in Germany, showcasing the tech and use-c ...read more