Since the announcement of its discovery earlier this month, the buried sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt, created a lot of speculation about who might be inside. Given the coffin’s large size and composition of granite, which would have had to be mined hundreds of miles away, experts said it was possible the coffin contained a man of importance, perhaps a nobleman of Alexander the Great. There was also a lot of online chatter about the possibility of unleashing a curse by openi ...read more

Tomorrow, on Saturday, July 21, Moth Week will commence! Running until Sunday, July 29, Moth Week is a way for people of all ages all around the world to come together to celebrate the beauty, life cycles, and habitats of moths. These self-described “Moth-ers� are in fact citizen scientists, as one of the key missions of Moth Week is to collect moth observation data. Though many of the events are in the United States, this is truly a worldwide effort. ...read more

If you had to give yourself a C-section to save your unborn baby, could you do it? Having given birth to my own child, I'm not sure I could. But this woman did it. She had no other choice: she lost a previous baby during protracted labor, and she lived in a small village eight hours drive from the nearest hospital. In the abstract and detailed case report below, doctors tell her (harrowing) story. And they tell it for a good reason: "This case, which would not have occurr ...read more

Scientists revealed a new species of armored dinosaur at the Natural History Museum of Utah on Wednesday. The animal, a species of ankylosaur, lived in a wet, tropical environment in what’s now Southern Utah roughly 75 million years ago. The herbivore sported spikes across its head and an intimidating tail club for fending off large predators like the tyrannosaurs that also roamed the landscape. Scientists dubbed it Akainacephalus johnsoni. “Literally tra ...read more

Those fruit flies buzzing around your pantry might be pesky, but to a neuroscientist, they’re a gold mine of information. The insects, tiny though they may be, are surprisingly sophisticated, boasting at least 100,000 neurons in a brain that handles everything from navigating via visual cues to complicated grooming rituals. For years, brain experts have been chiseling away at the daunting task of mapping this tiny insect’s brain, which is about the size of ...read more

You say to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to. You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to. You say Candida krusei, I say Pichia kudriavzevii  — and that should make you a little nervous. OK, so that last bit needs explaining. C. krusei is a drug-resistant yeast species that’s responsible for thousands of potentially fatal infections in the United States every year. P. kudriavzevii is a yeast species that’s been widely used for centuries in the ...read more

The deep reefs that lie out of sight of human eyes aren't similarly shielded from our destructive behaviors. A recent study of mesophotic reefs, those lying between 100 and 500 feet below the surface, finds many of the same issues plaguing reefs at shallower depths. It's overturning previous theories that deep reefs might be protected by virtue of their remote location, and that they could potentially serve as a haven of sorts for imperiled species living in shallower areas. Brand New Da ...read more

Plants dominate life on Earth, making up more than 80 percent of biomass as measured in gigatons of carbon. On land, plants today boast a wide range of complex shapes, from stout baobab trees to winding ivy, but they all evolved from a simpler past. Land plants trace their roots to aquatic algae that were limited to pretty much two options when it came to structure: stringy or flat. But somewhere along the way, these early plants learned to grow in a multitude of shapes to adapt to l ...read more

Fire at will! Researchers present evidence that Neanderthals were just as capable of producing fire as early Homo sapiens were, sending another long-held notion of our species' exceptionalism up in smoke. I'm not just fanning the flames here: The question of whether our closest evolutionary kin used fire the same way our ancestors did has been a controversial one for decades, and its debate mirrors broader trends in paleoanthropology. Members of the genus Homo appear t ...read more

Although NOAA's just-released analysis differs somewhat, both show that June 2018 continued the long-term global warming trend Last month tied with June 1998 as the third warmest such month since 1880. Only June 2015 and 2016 were warmer, according to the monthly analysis released this week by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Today, the National Oceanic and Administration issued its own, independent analysis, ...read more