How do you know when an Ice Age teen hits puberty? You can see it in their bones.A research group for the first time applied a technique initially developed for contemporary clinical observations to Paleolithic fossils. They reported in the Journal of Human Evolution that Ice Age teens experienced the same physiological changes as contemporary young adolescents at roughly the same time. Ice Age Bones Reveal Clues About AdolescenceThe scientists studied the bones of 13 ancient humans between 10 a ...read more

The Fermi paradox boils down to a simple question: where is everybody? In other words, if we’re not alone in the universe, then why haven’t we seen any evidence for aliens yet? To date, there is no consensus resolution to the Fermi Paradox…and we still have no evidence for aliens.Who Came Up With the Fermi Paradox?(Credit: Janusz Pienkowski/Shutterstock)Lore has it that in the summer of 1950, famed Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was out to lunch one day with some friends and colle ...read more

If you live in southern California, then it would come as no surprise that the ground could start shaking at any time. That’s because this part of the country is prone to earthquakes.But it might come as a surprise that this isn’t the only part of the country where the ground could and has started shaking. Central Virginia and the Lowcountry of South Carolina, for example, have and could in the future be home to the next big earthquake.It's these unexpected hotspots that can inflict the most ...read more

Chicory appears to be having a moment. Although the plant’s use has long been associated with New Orleans coffee, it is catching on globally. Some people are using it as a coffee supplement. Others are completely replacing coffee with chicory. And still others are adding it to other foods, for a variety of purported health benefits.Whatever the uses and reasons behind them, chicory sales are booming. One report estimated the global chicory market at $685 million in 2020 and is projected to hit ...read more

Our planet still can't seem to beat the heat.Last month was the warmest August on record. "Sweltering" was the word used by the normally staid National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to sum up the findings of its regular monthly analysis. And August wasn't just a one-off. By NASA's independent calculation, last month caps the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere since global record-keeping began in the 1800s. It also extends our planet's heat streak to 15 straight months of record s ...read more

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death.Usually, scientists consider death to be the irreversible halt of functioning of an organism as a whole. However, practices such as organ donation highlight how organs, tissues and cells can continue to function even after an organism’s demise. This resilience raises ...read more

If you haven’t given it much thought, you probably think non-human animals see the world the same way we do. The truth is the world looks very different to most other animals than it does to us.And this discrepancy between how non-human animals see the world and how we do can be a problem for wildlife biologists. To address this, Daniel Hanley, biologist at George Mason University and his team published their results in PLOS Biology on a new recording system that could help better capture how ...read more

Contemporary coelacanths are often described as living fossils. Superficially, that may be true. But new evidence now makes that nickname less valid. The two species of the large-boned lungfish alive today don’t look that much different than the first known coelacanth fossil dating back over 410 million years ago. But two new fossils show that the species did evolve — albeit slowly and subtly. Also, scientists for the first time link evolution to tectonic activity, according to a report in N ...read more

What parent hasn’t been there? It’s been a long day, you still have dinner to make, maybe lunches for tomorrow too, and you just don’t have the energy to wrangle your kids into a new art project or plead with them to pick up a book.Instead, you give in when they beg for more iPad time. Or maybe they promise they’ll do their homework after just a few more YouTube videos, and it’s easier to agree than have another argument. Now you’re not only exhausted, you feel like a bad parent too. ...read more

Boeing’s crew transport space capsule, the Starliner, returned to Earth without its two-person crew right after midnight Eastern time on Sept. 7, 2024. Its remotely piloted return marked the end of a fraught test flight to the International Space Station which left two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, on the station for months longer than intended after thruster failures led NASA to deem the capsule unsafe to pilot back.Wilmore and Williams will stay on the Internation ...read more