It all started in the small town of Lyme, Connecticut. For years, doctors had been diagnosing children with a type of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that had begun popping up in the area. But it wasn’t until 1975 that the condition was conclusively identified as something separate, and named after the town where it was first observed.In the decades since this discovery, the tickborne pathogen has spread to a number of new states and into Canada. In the U.S., Lyme disease is (by far) the most co ...read more

In 1931, geologists excavated skull fragments from a fossil bed along the Solo River in Java, an Indonesian island under Dutch colonial rule. Over the next two years, they uncovered 10 more skull specimens and two pieces from a tibia. The geologists identified the bones as belonging to a previously undiscovered ancient human, Homo soloensis.Who Was Solo Man?Solo Man, as the specimen came to be known, has been a point of curiosity among archaeologists ever since its discovery. The hominid rese ...read more

The first of several global climate analyses for the month of September is now in, and the warmth it documents is simply astonishing. As Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth put it on Twitter: "This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist – absolutely gobsmackingly bananas."During September, the average air temperature at the surface was 0.5 degrees C (1.674 degrees F) above the 1991-2020 average for the month, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service. That ...read more

Human footprints found in an ancient lakebed in White Sands National Park, New Mexico date to between 21,000 years and 23,000 years ago, according to new findings that bolster a much-debated study from 2021.The lightning-rod paper ran counter to the generally held scientific position that humans didn’t arrive in the Americas until between 13,000 years and 16,000 years ago. Prior to that – during the Last Glacial Maximum – massive glaciers would have impeded human migration from modern-day ...read more

Despite their public image as torpid, lumbering creatures, many dinosaurs were evidently warm-blooded, highly active animals, capable of prolonged and strenuous aerobic exercise.In new research, my colleagues and I determined how much energy minibus-sized dinosaurs called Maiasaura used while growing to adulthood.Our results, published in the journal Paleobiology, show Maiasaura was capable of taking in huge amounts of energy and nutrients and using them for rapid growth and levels of activit ...read more

Humans first domesticated dogs some 14,000 years to 29,000 years ago, though this is still up for debate. While it’s settled science that they evolved from grey wolves — the debate over where and how is still far from settled.Research has called into question the belief that all dogs evolved from the same Eurasian grey wolf population, suggesting there could have been both a western and eastern Eurasian wolf population from which dogs descended. What is known is that dogs and humans hav ...read more

For quite some time, climate scientists faced a conundrum: Even as the planet warmed, Antarctica's vast expanses of floating sea ice weren't shrinking. In fact, at times the ice was expanding, confounding common-sense and the predictions of sophisticated climate models.Meanwhile, sea ice in the Arctic far to the north was shriveling dramatically, more or less as models predicted, and just as you'd expect in a warming world. This stark discrepancy led climate change skeptics, and some media ...read more

Contrary to what you might believe, you aren't actually living in the 21st Century. Instead, you're in the 1700s, and the reason that most of you don't recognize this fact is that the elites of the early medieval period worked hard to deceive you. At least, that's what German historian Herbert Illig puts forward in his phantom time hypothesis. "There's this outrageous claim that all historians have made a mistake and that we've all had the wool pulled over our eyes and that the chronology we a ...read more

When early humans first arrived in modern-day Spain, about a million and a half years ago, they immediately faced a quandary: what to eat?Scientists have long suspected that they borrowed from the still-fresh kills of saber-tooth cats, which would have only eaten a portion of their meal. In doing so, Homo erectus, or perhaps another early hominin, would have faced competition from the bone-crushing giant hyena, a long-extinct scavenger that would have weighed more than 200 pounds.But have no fea ...read more

Jamie Ellis has experienced thousands of bee stings in his lifetime. Ellis, a professor in the entomology and nematology department at the University of Florida, admits to experiencing between 400 and 450 stings in a single day while conducting research. Even after experiencing many stings, he says they are still painful. “You never really get immune to the pain,” Ellis says.Bees work hard to defend their hive, and causing pain to an organism they want to drive away as quickly as possible is ...read more