The skip in the human footstep – the flexing of the arch with each step – does little to help carry the body forward, a new study has found. Instead, it serves to keep the ankle upright, so that we walk in the characteristic way of human beings and not like other apes.The finding overturns conventional wisdom and may help in the treatment of people whose arches have become rigid due to illness or injury.“We thought originally that the spring-like arch helped to lift the body into the next ...read more

The Paleozoic Museum in Central Park was sure to be spectacular. The 1868 plans for the museum imagined an immense and sophisticated space filled with fanciful dioramas of dinosaurs and other ancient animals, all intended to incite a passion for paleontology in its visitors.But in May 1871, the models that were made for the museum were destroyed by a band of sledgehammer-wielding workmen. The incident was one of the most strange and startling moments in the history of paleontology. And as the sm ...read more

The Moonrush has begun. Last year, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission flew to the Moon and back in a test of the technology that will take humans back to the surface in the next few years. The Artemis program will establish a space station called the Lunar Gateway in orbit and a base on the surface. There will be other visitors too — both Russia and China are planning crewed missions. And some 30 uncrewed missions are in various stages of completion by spacefaring nations and private companies.All tha ...read more

Imagine you're a leech in one of the lush rainforests of Southeast Asia (or Madagascar or mainland Africa) that you call home. Perhaps you're clinging to the underbelly of a low-lying plant or burrowed just below the surface in a patch of damp soil. Then, dozens of human tourists start marching through the terrain, providing countless opportunities for you and your companions to suction yourselves onto their boots, or drop down from the trees above. Surely, for the leeches, large groups of human ...read more

Snow leopards are so rare that many of the researchers who have studied them for decades have never even seen one in the flesh. These big cats may leave scat or even the occasional tuft of fur in a hair snare, but their passage is often ghostly — so much, in fact, that photographers are only just now capturing many aspects of their lives. In many areas, snow leopards still face conservation threats due to mining development, livestock herding and persecution from locals in their range.Snow Leo ...read more

In 1346, Tartar leader Khan Janibeg laid siege to a Genoese city in Crimea called Kaffa in hopes of removing the Italians from this central foothold. What happened next has become part-legend, part-historical record: As the Tartars waited outside Kaffa’s walls, the soldiers began to fall one by one to a terrible disease, the plague.Out of frustration, the Tartar leaders catapulted the disease-ridden bodies over the walls of the city, where the residents threw the bodies aside and fled in ships ...read more

Unless you’re Peter Pan, you can’t lose your shadow. At least, not permanently. Shadows crop up wherever light is obstructed by an object, and they come in a range of shapes and sizes. In 2012, for example, physicists captured the first-ever view of an atomic shadow by shining a laser at a single ytterbium atom in a vacuum chamber. And on a much larger scale, our moon blocks the light of the Sun from reaching Earth during solar eclipses. Millions of people will witness this firsthand in 20 ...read more

The United States is a volcanic country. Sure, a large swath of it east of the Rocky Mountains haven’t had an eruptions of tens to hundreds of millions years, but the western US, Alaska and Hawai’i are all full of active or potentially active volcanoes. This got me wondering what are the biggest eruptions the US has experienced and that led me down a rabbit hole considering what that question actually means. So, I present you with the largest eruptions in the US over the last 10,000 years. A ...read more

If there’s one thing that paleoanthropology has revealed time and again, it’s that many renditions of ancient human species preceded us modern humans today.While Neanderthals and even Homo erectus have become fixtures in the human origin story, a lesser-known predecessor appears to predate all the others: Homo habilis.H. habilis has been called the oldest known member within the Homo genus, though not without controversy and ongoing debate.By many scientists’ accounts, the species was like ...read more

Dwarf stars invisible to the naked eye could be hiding a wealth of exoplanets that contain liquid water and suitable conditions for life, according to a new study. The faint red stars make up some 58 of the 100-plus billion stars in the Milky Way, so the new findings greatly expand the prospects for planet hunting.Scientists already knew that red dwarfs hosted planets, but the new study estimates what percentage of their planets orbit in a way that preserves liquid water and chances for life.Wha ...read more