Dinosaurs roamed for thousands of years on Earth. They thrived in various environments, so they must have had some pretty good strategies for keeping offspring alive and ensuring the species' survival. Learning about what these techniques might be hasn't been easy for paleontologists, who've primarily worked with scarce, fragmented fossil evidence. The main theory is that just like living animals exhibit a variety of behaviors from species to species, it's likely that dinosaurs also were variab ...read more

The costly tuberculosis (TB) drug bedaquiline, a lifesaver in more difficult cases, will be available in generic form to many low- and middle-income countries around the world, under a surprise agreement announced July 13, 2023. The accord was negotiated quietly between Johnson & Johnson and international group Stop TB Partnership, which provides TB drugs to lower income countries around the world.Activists such as Doctors Without Borders and The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, who led ...read more

Some 125 million years ago, dinosaurs like Iguanodon and Polacanthus walked the floodplains of the Isle of Wight, a quaint island off the southwestern corner of England.In fact, so many of these giants roamed there — or the conditions for preservation were so good — that the island now holds one of the richest deposits of dinosaur fossils in all of Europe, with parts of more than 20 species dating to the early Cretaceous period.Some of these, like the Iguanodon, were among the first dinosaur ...read more

Assuming human beings don’t wipe themselves out in the coming decades, and technology continues to develop at current rates, our species just might eventually expand into other parts of the solar system.After all, NASA has plans to build a permanent moon base, and steps are being taken to send crewed spacecrafts to Mars. Should we get there, humans must grapple with various potential methods of survival as a space-faring civilization.Two general schools of thought have emerged, each with a vas ...read more

As a person with life-long hearing loss, I rely on hearing aids to help me navigate my muffled world. Because I have layers of hearing loss in one of my ears, I function as a “one-eared listener,” and sometimes, my hearing aids aren’t enough. The sounds I hear are often garbled due to my auditory processing disorder, which can make language hard to decipher.Yet, I love music. This might seem counterintuitive — how can a person with hearing loss enjoy music?With the help of brain imaging, ...read more

As sessile living things, plants must adapt and respond to their ever-changing environments. And in recent years, understanding how roots may regulate high temperatures has gained traction among scientists.Biologists thought young plant shoots controlled temperature within the plants and acted as a transmitter that signaled the root to alter its growth, said Marcel Quint, a plant biologist and study author at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, in a statement.Now, plant biologists fou ...read more

We all forget things from time to time. Whether it’s a mistaken name or a misplaced wallet, forgetfulness is a normal part of life. But older adults are particularly prone to worrying about their memory. According to recent research, around 48 percent of adults in their 50s and early 60s anticipate developing dementia in the United States as they age, and around 44 percent worry about the possibility of memory-deteriorating disorders.Of course, that tendency to worry makes sense, since Alzheim ...read more

Supermassive black holes take time to form. That’s why scientists are puzzling over the discovery of one that existed a mere 570 million years after the Big Bang, only 100 to 300 years after the first stars began to form in the nascent universe.Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have indicated that the black hole – at the center of an early galaxy, CEERS 1019 – was busy some 13 billion years ago, sucking down gas and growing larger. Meanwhile, its host galaxy was creat ...read more

Human beings have evolved to thrive in the conditions of our planet. Often though, people thrust themselves into extreme environments: scientists studying Antarctic weather patterns, divers recovering wreckage from the deep sea, or explorers mapping sprawling cave systems.What we know is that people are resilient, and the human psyche can adapt to deal with a range of scenarios. But what about being marooned on another planet, with only a thin barrier separating you and your peers from the vacuu ...read more

In its 3.7-billion-year history on Earth, life has had a few setbacks.As far as we know, there have been five major extinction events where a significant percentage of species were wiped out of existence. Several things can cause such a dramatic destabilization of Earth’s life cycles, including super-volcanic eruptions, ice ages and pandemics.However, another mechanism by which life faces existential threat is, of course, gigantic asteroid impacts. And when it comes to these rocks plunging int ...read more