Did your dad like to take cold showers? Or perhaps he was a ski buff, or an open-water swimmer. It's too late now, but you very might well wish that your paternal progenitor had a fondness for cold temperatures. A new study published Monday in Nature Medicine shows that mice exposed to cold temperatures sire offspring that are both slimmer and healthier on high-fat diets than those whose fathers were kept warm. Freezing Fathers Fight Fat Chilling mice to see ...read more

The past few weeks have featured a few stories about how Albert Einstein’s theories, or the ideas underpinning them, have all been confirmed to a new degree of accuracy. That’s usually the case: Scientists try to disprove Einstein, and Einstein always wins. But that’s not to say the man was infallible. He was human, just like the rest of us, and did make some mistakes. Here’s a few of them. 1) The cosmological consta ...read more

Bright pink 1.1-billion-year-old molecules from deep beneath the Sahara desert are now the oldest biological colors that scientists have discovered so far, and could shed light on why complex, multicellular life took so long to evolve on Earth. This discovery "really came as a fluke," said study senior author Jochen Brocks, a paleobiogeochemist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "About 10 years ago, a petroleum company looking for oil in the Sahara was exploring the black ...read more

Hot flashes — sudden rushes of overwhelming warmth that heat up the body like a roaring furnace – plague millions of women, and some men. Now scientists find a single type of brain cell is responsible for setting off these heat bombs in mice. The discovery may lead to better treatments for keeping the body’s thermostat at a pleasant temperature. Currently, the go-to remedy for hot flashes is estrogen replacement therapy to compensate for ...read more

In the second century, the Greco-Roman writer Oppian described men in rowboats thrusting harpoons into a “sea monster,� which is then roped and towed to shore. At the time, the Romans had a successful fishing industry in the Strait of Gibraltar, the western waterway to the Mediterranean world. Historians sometimes say Roman fishing at this bottleneck included whaling, but other than Oppian’s poem and other indirect clues, there was no e ...read more

Amid a growing number of finds that challenge the long-held timeline of the peopling of the Americas, researchers get to the point: Artifacts found at a site in Texas, including projectile points of a previously unknown style, are at least 16,000 years old, pre-dating the conventional arrival date of First Americans. For decades, the Clovis culture loomed large in theories about when the First Americans arrived to the New World. Named for a town in New Mexico where the f ...read more

Nearly a hundred stone tools excavated from multiple layers at a site in China point to hominins — our ancestors and closest kin — being in East Asia about 2.1 million years ago. The find is the oldest evidence of hominins outside of Africa by more than 200,000 years and begs the question: what species made them? Hominins are those species in the greater primate family tree that are more closely related to us than to other apes. That includes members of ou ...read more

Francis Ford Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg: all directors who’ve had a string of successes in their careers. Hot streaks like these stretch beyond the realm of movie directors, though. Athletes, gamblers, musicians — the list could go on. Regardless of your niche, what’s going on that spurs these back-to-back wins? And when are they most likely to strike? To try and find out, an international group of researchers looked at ...read more

Four billion years ago, an immense galaxy with a black hole at its heart spewed forth a jet of particles at nearly the speed of light. One of those particles, a neutrino that is just a fraction of the size of a regular atom, traversed across the universe on a collision course for Earth, finally striking the ice sheet of Antarctica last September. As it hit, a neutrino detector planted by scientists within the ice recorded the neutrino’s charged interaction, causing a blue flas ...read more

Men trying to look good for the ladies might pump iron, but when male mice are regularly exposed to male rivals, it results in thicker penis bones, potentially because wider girth might prove more desirable to females, a new study finds. The intense rivalry between males over females has helped drive the evolution of many extraordinary male traits, from peacock plumes to the gigantic antlers of the extinct Irish elk. Evolutionary biologist Gonçalo Igreja André at the U ...read more