It’s a news headline that can send a chill up the backs of pet owners. A small family pet is outside when a bird of prey swoops down and attacks.In Colorado, an eagle preyed on a Pomeranian while it was in the family’s fenced-in yard. In Canada, home security cameras captured a Yorkie puppy escaping an eagle’s grip. And in a Philadelphia public park, a hawk came up behind a small dog with its talons extended.[embedded content]These stories can prompt a pet owner to fear for their anim ...read more

Ask an AI machine like as ChatGPT, Bard or Claude to explain how to make a bomb or to tell you a racist joke and you’ll get short shrift. The companies behind these so-called Large Language Models are well aware of their potential to generate malicious or harmful content and so have created various safeguards to prevent it. In the AI community, this process is known as “alignment” — it makes the AI system better aligned wth human values. And in general, it works well. But it also sets up ...read more

Honey from the Australian honeypot ant (Camponotus inflatus) may have medicinal properties that fight infection. While this has been known among Australia’s indigenous peoples for thousands of years, Western science has now formally studied the organic substance’s antimicrobial properties in a recent study published in PeerJ.The interest in using honey as an antimicrobial treatment in modern medicine has skyrocketed with recent increases in antimicrobial resistance. Other studies have found ...read more

Tens of thousands of years ago in prehistoric Eurasia, some daredevil made friends with a gray wolf. The millions of domesticated dogs we see today are all likely its descendants, and their enormous diversity masks a remarkable fact: Even after millennia of selective breeding, all of them, from the Chihuahua to the St. Bernard, remain members of the same species.Canis familiaris displays by far the most variation of any mammal, and it’s still evolving at a steady clip. The mutation rate is s ...read more

The city of Rome has been around for a long time. According to legend, it was founded over 2,700 years ago and became the most powerful city in the Western world. Volcanic materials are integral to many of the structures, both as building stone and a key ingredient to the remarkably durable Roman concrete. It is no coincidence that Rome is surrounded by volcanic features, some of which have produced cataclysmic eruptions over the past 500,000 years. Welcome to the Roman Magmatic Province.Rome it ...read more

Our understanding of our ancestors gets pretty murky when you go far enough back in time. Still, scientists have discovered numerous tools associated with Homo erectus — widely regarded as a direct ancestor to modern humans — over the years. For example, researchers recently discovered tools in Kenya (associated possibly with Paranthropus or another precursor to the Homo genus) that may date back as far as 3 million years.But there's a difference between making a few tools when the opportuni ...read more

Vitamin B12 is an essential nutrient that plays an indispensable role in keeping the body healthy. Most people get enough B12 from animal-based foods in their diets without issue. Certain lifestyle factors or medical conditions, however, can cause vitamin B12 deficiency, resulting in serious health problems. For many B12-deficient individuals, adding extra B12 to the diet with supplements or fortified foods can easily correct the problem. But how much do you actually need and how does it impact ...read more

It’s a moment that virtually all cat owners either come to love or dread: when your feline pal jumps on your lap and begins the familiar ritual of flexing and pressing its paws into you, rhythmically kneading your body as though you were the world’s biggest ball of dough.Often, cats will purr while doing it, and maybe even drool a little or stare off into the middle distance, zoning out in that way that only cats can. If you’re lucky, it’s a momentary event and then they snuggle down for ...read more

Rafael Jiménez Medina learned how to hunt elusive Iberian moles in the fields of southern Spain in the 1980s, when he was a young PhD student in genetics at the University of Granada.A local hunter of the moles (Talpa occidentalis) taught him how to capture these solitary, aggressive and territorial animals. The moles dig subterranean galleries and labyrinths in the meadows of the Iberian Peninsula, especially those with soft soils rich in earthworms, their favorite food. Such activity can bene ...read more

In 2017, a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology reported on a surprising genetic analysis. A person buried at the ancient Viking site of Birka, alongside weapons and other equipment befitting a male Viking warrior, had no Y chromosome. She was a biological woman.Archaeologists had read about such warriors in ancient poetry, but female fighters “have generally been dismissed as mythological phenomena,” the paper says.The Birka woman and other discoveries have challenged the ...read more