Long before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, people were using antibiotics to combat infections. In the late 1800s, French physician Ernest Duchesne observed Arab stable boys treating sores with mold growing on saddles. Duchesne took a sample of the fungus, identified it as Penicillium and used it to cure guinea pigs infected with typhoid. Earlier still, texts from ancient civilizations, including Rome, Egypt and China, discussed the healing powers of moldy bread applied t ...read more

Our universe’s first galaxies shone hotter and brighter than scientists thought, according to a group of astronomers who tapped a whopping 400 hours of observing time on NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The discovery could answer a long-standing question about how light first traveled freely through the infant universe. “We did not expect that Spitzer, with a mirror no larger than a Hula-Hoop, would be capable of seeing galaxies so close to the dawn of time,&rdqu ...read more

The universe's first stars were extremely hot and incredibly large, often reaching hundreds of times the mass of the Sun. And because they formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, these boiling behemoths contained virtually no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which were the only materials readily available at the time. But due to their sizeable stature, the first stars also lived fast and died hard — lasting only a couple million years before they exploded ...read more

And the stew is now boiling more vigorously: Heavy precipitation events have grown stronger and more frequent over the long run With big, boiling thunderstorms spewing hail and spawning tornadoes in the Southern Plains and beyond even as snow once again falls elsewhere, the weather sure does seem wild and weird this week. Spring often brings a meteorological roller coaster ride, thanks to the tension between lingering cold and spreading warmth. And, in fact, ...read more

Penguins love company — some colonies of the flightless bird boast numbers over 1 million. And with squads that can run that deep, you can be sure they make a mess of things, if you know what I mean. (Hint: I’m talking about poop.) But penguin waste isn’t just messy, it can be useful, too. Researchers have used it to help spot colonies in the past. Now, it seems that poop might be good for something else as well. In a study out in Current Biology, researchers from Vrije Univer ...read more

On Thursday, Blue Origin founder and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos unveiled the Blue Moon lander, a spacecraft that can deliver up to 6.5 tons of cargo – and possibly crew – to the lunar surface. The announcement was made at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Along with Blue Moon, he revealed his new BE-7 rocket for the lander, which he says has been in development for three years. If all goes according to plan, the company will test fire the rocket for the first time this summer. Toget ...read more

The first human-made spacecraft to reach another star system might fit in the palm of your hand. That’s the design engineers from the University of California, Santa Barbara are working on. The tiny craft, which weighs about as much same as a stick of gum, had its first test flight in April, where it soared more than 100,000 feet in the air. Its creators hope its successor will one day fly in space, perhaps even beyond the solar system to neighboring stars like Alpha Centauri. Wafercr ...read more

Around the world, obesity is on the rise. A global uptick in body mass index, or BMI — a measure of whether a person’s weight is healthy for how tall they are — has coincided with rapid urbanization, leading to the assumption that urbanization is the main reason behind the global obesity epidemic. Now, a large new report reveals the rise of global BMI comes from people living in rural areas rather than people living in urban areas. The finding contrasts the ...read more

Powered flight among living things has been around for hundreds of millions of years. Dinosaurs, and their relatives the pterosaurs, figured out how to take to the skies long before their avian descendants today did. Now, a new species of dinosaur is shedding some light on the evolutionary path that lofted reptiles skyward. The fossil, discovered in Liaoning Province in China and named Ambopteryx longibrachium, is actually notable for the fact that it seems to be an altogether different e ...read more

Remember Australopithecus sediba? The convention-challenging South African hominin, announced with much fanfare in 2010, has gotten lost in a torrent of other recent fossil finds from our family tree. A new study adds insult to injury, stacking the odds against A. sediba's place in our distant evolutionary past. The last decade or so has been a wild ride for researchers trying to figure out the story of human evolution. The family tree of hominins — humans and species more clos ...read more