A new COVID variant known as NB.1.8.1 is on the rise in the U.S. and beyond, landing on the radar of health officials. The variant, first identified in January 2025, is now being closely monitored, with cases already popping up across several states. A report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) Technical Advisory Group states that the global public health risk posed by NB.1.8.1 is currently low; it also says, however, that the variant’s mutations may increase its ability to be tra ...read more

Fossils found in the stomach of a 100-million-year-old sauropod reveal that these dinosaurs didn’t fully chew their food and relied on stomach microbes for digestion. A new study from Current Biology analyzed the fossilized abdomen of a sauropod. Within it were fossilized plants, which provided further evidence that these creatures were herbivores and barely chewed their food. “No genuine sauropod gut contents had ever been found anywhere before, despite sauropods being known from fossils ...read more

Family members remember some of the early signs of Alzheimer’s in their loved ones quite well. This type of dementia often begins with struggles in communication, lapses in memory, and confusion around everyday problem-solving.But scientists are now uncovering evidence of another early signal — mood disorders, like depression and bipolar disorder, that begin later in life. While a link between these conditions and Alzheimer’s has long been suspected, what’s been missing is a clear unders ...read more

An international team of researchers has unlocked ancient genomes (aDNA) from Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago for the very first time. By combining aDNA, dietary evidence, and linguistics, the team has learned more about the migration of many ancient Pacific peoples, including the ancestors of the Māori.A new study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, describes this use of aDNA as acting like a “time machine,” allowing us to travel back to the ancient past and recover s ...read more

Key Takeaways on Crow Intelligence: Crows are highly intelligent. They can recognize faces, hold grudges, and even recognize cars. Crows cache food, and will move it if another creature sees them hiding it. They use tools, and fashion tools from twigs, forming them into the right shape for the job, making hooked tools to snag food.Most of the corvid family, which includes ravens, jackdaws, and jays, as well as crows, seem to try new things, investigate new situations, and take advantage of new o ...read more

The epidermis (skin) is the body’s largest organ, so it would make sense that toxins found in fabrics that sit on the skin’s surface could be absorbed by the skin and make their way into the bloodstream. And polyester has been considered a particularly suspect fabric because it’s made from a chemical called polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic polymer used in various products.One study published in 1993 followed 24 dogs who were divided into two equal groups, one group wore cotton underpa ...read more

As intimidating as they seem up close, humpback whales often see humans as friends, not foes. The sociability of these gentle souls is perhaps best represented by a curious behavior they exhibit when approaching humans, in which they create large bubble rings that look like “smoke rings” as they rise to the surface. A recent study published in Marine Mammal Science suggests that humpback whales may be sending bubble rings like messages to humans as a way to break the ice. Humpback whales ha ...read more

The early cosmos isn’t the easiest to envision. But this June 2025, the team behind the Cosmic Evolution Survey, or the COSMOS collaboration, has made it a bit easier to explore, having released the most complete map of the deep universe to date. Stitched together from thousands of snapshots, the map is called the COSMOS-Web field, and it reveals almost 800,000 galaxies stretching all the way back to the universe’s start. “Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical sc ...read more

Turns out, it’s not just chromosomes that determine sex during fetal development. While we’ve long believed that an embryo’s sex is locked in from the moment sperm meets egg (XX for female, XY for male) new research suggests things might not be so fixed. In fact, all humans start out with the same potential. For the first six weeks of development, we all carry the foundation to become either sex. It’s only around week seven that the body switches on a biological program to form either te ...read more

Although volcanic eruptions may seem like a distant worry for many of us, about 10 percent of the world’s population lives within striking distance of a volcano. This includes those living in the U.S., which is, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, one of the world’s most volcanically active countries. The widespread threat is why many scientists are working to discover early warning signs of volcanic activity. A new study, published by NASA, revealed an unlikely hero stepping up to hel ...read more