The bird's fossil was found with its 3D structure intact — a rare find that helped paleontologists glean insights into the development of flight. ...read more

(Credit: Gladskikh Tatiana/Shutterstock) Some of the biggest public health crises of the last few years can be traced back to animals. HIV got its start as a virus in monkeys, and Ebola probably jumped to humans from other primates or fruit bats. And there’s no points for guessing the animals we got bird flu and swine flu from. But animal-borne diseases can start a lot closer to home. In fact, there are a number we can pick up from our dogs and cats. Our Pets, Their Diseases M ...read more

A floating butterfly created by the Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display. (Credit: Eimontas Jankauskis) With the help of sound waves and a small plastic ball, researchers in the U.K. have designed a machine that generates truly 3D holographs. The whole system is slightly smaller than a shoebox and makes simple images, like a butterfly or smiley face, that are less than an inch tall. Described in Nature, the device is one of the first 3D image generators that also responds to touch and produce ...read more

Scene from the Books of the Dead (The Egyptian museum) showing the ibis-headed God Thoth recording the result of the final judgement. (Credit: Wasef et al, 2019) Ancient Egyptian catacombs stretch for kilometers underground. Branching off the tunnels are rooms, and those rooms are stacked to the ceilings with jars holding more than one million mummified African sacred ibises.  Egyptians buried millions of these leggy, long-beaked birds as prayer offerings to Thoth, the god of wisdom a ...read more

The Egyptians mummified millions of ibises as offerings to the god Thoth. Now, scientists look at where all those birds came from. ...read more

Artist's rendering of how large Gigantopithecus blacki may have been. In life, G. blacki would have spent most of its time on all fours. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) There's nothing small about Gigantopithecus blacki. The massive extinct animal likely rivaled a modern polar bear in size, weighing more than 1,000 pounds and standing nearly ten feet tall on its back legs. The mystery around G. blacki is also super-sized. This largest of primates is known only from plentiful teeth and a fe ...read more

From dolphins to redwoods, species learn from — and rely on — their parents. ...read more

Growing plants off-world is an essential, and increasingly likely, part of exploring the cosmos. ...read more

Thanks to one man's perseverance, we know even small doses of lead can permanently harm growing kids. ...read more

Advances in brain imaging technology are getting closer to revealing the shape of our thoughts. ...read more