Don’t you just hate it when a moth larva busts in through the wall of your house like some squirmy lepidopteran Kool-Aid man? If you’re a colony of aphids living in a gall, this is a real threat. But luckily there’s a team of heroes ready to spring to action, even sacrifice themselves, to repair that wall and save the rest of the clan. A team of Japanese researchers has been studying this phenomenon for over 15 years. Their latest work, out this week in PNAS, breaks down the i ...read more

Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what's now Kenya and you've got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. The enormous bitey mammal was identified only after researchers rediscovered partial fossils of it, forgotten in the backroom of a museum. To be clear, Simbakubwa is neither a bear nor a member of the extended feline family, even though its name is Swahili for "big lion." Instead, the mas ...read more

Our solar system is a whopping 4.5 billion years old. And those earliest days were some of the most interesting for astronomers. That's when the planets formed, building from dust grains into the whole worlds that now populate our space neighborhood. But most of this material has been drastically changed since its early days – incorporated into planets, or baked by the sun and weathered by time. However, if we could find material that hasn’t been ch ...read more

Researchers say they've rebooted pigs’ brains four hours after the animals died. The scientists managed to restore some blood flow and brain cell activity to the dead animals' brains by pumping a protective solution through the tissue using a proprietary technology they call BrainEx. The brain was never alert and researchers did not restore consciousness, but the work could lead to new ways to aid recovery after trauma like heart attacks and strokes, the researchers say ...read more

Toothy tyrannosaurs and enormous titanosaurs may be the most dramatic dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous, but plant-eating hadrosaurs had the numbers. These widely-distributed animals, often called duck-billed dinosaurs, are among the most commonly found fossils from the period that stretched 66 million-100 million years ago. Yet the hadrosaur origin story remains a bit of a mystery. Today, a magnificent new find from Mongolia fills in some of the gaps. Paleontologists unearthed m ...read more

During the last centuries of China’s Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon, rich and varied in its manifestations. Rulers and elites sacrificed animals and humans to appease spirits or the ancestors. Just as humans met their ends, dogs were often right beside them. Now a study in Archaeological Research in Asia, published in March, shows that people from the Shang dynasty relied heavily on sacrificial puppies to acco ...read more

Everything has a beginning. That’s true for stories, for people, for the universe and even for chemistry. The Big Bang itself produced just a handful of elements (variations of hydrogen, helium and lithium nuclei), so researchers have a pretty good sense of what the first atoms and molecules might have been. But the very first molecular bond to form, linking together atoms of different elements in a single molecule, has long been missing in action. Known as a helium hydride ion (HeH+), th ...read more

Volcanoes can be pretty dangerous. Thankfully, we've gotten better over the last half century at getting people out of the way of volcanic hazards! However, many hundreds of millions of people still live close enough to volcanoes to feel the impact of an eruption -- especially when the volcano decides to have a spectacular eruption. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what the most dangerous aspects of a volcanic eruption might be. I think many people picture lava flows casc ...read more

Brothers compete. So in 2016, when astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth after spending a year in space, it must have really annoyed his identical twin brother — retired astronaut Mark Kelly — that Scott was two inches taller than when he left. However, Scott's temporary increase in height was not the only thing that changed during his trip. As part of NASA's Twins Study, while Scott was in space, Mark went about his daily life on Earth. Over the course of the year-long mission, r ...read more

When Steven Anderson first examined a specimen of the Iranian spider-tailed viper, he, of course, noticed the arachnid-shaped lump on the dead snake’s tail. It was 1970, and the herpetologist was at the Field Museum in Chicago examining what the museum assumed to be a Persian horned viper, a snake common throughout the Middle East. But this one had such a bizarre growth on its tail. To Anderson, a biologist who studies reptiles in Southeast Asia, it resembled “an oval knob-like stru ...read more