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
As a lung transplant surgeon, Matt Bacchetta has watched countless patients wait for an organ, only to not get one. About 80 percent of donor lungs are not in good enough to shape to use. Now Bacchetta and a team of researchers from Columbia University in New York City have shown that they can repair damaged pig lungs so they are suitable for transplants. If it works in humans, the discovery could dramatically expand the number of usable donor organs, the researchers say.
“There’s s ...read more
These are consequential days for ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. Drivers in many U.S. cities are going on strike today, protesting low pay, and analysts expect Uber will likely earn billions when it goes public on Friday. (The two events are not unrelated.)
But amidst the economic discussions, at least we can all agree that it’s good news in terms of traffic, right? The more people rely on professional drivers to get around, the fewer individual cars will be clogging up the str ...read more
In a first, researchers have used chemical fingerprints locked within coral skeletons to build a season-by-season record of El Niño episodes dating back 400 years — a feat many experts regarded as impossible.
That record, presented in a new study appearing in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, reveals an "extraordinary change" in the behavior of El Niño, according to the researchers. That shift "has serious implications for societies and ecosystems arou ...read more
Coca-Cola has poured millions of dollars into scientific research at universities. But if the beverage giant doesn’t like what scientists find, the company has the power to make sure that their research never sees the light of day.
That’s according to an analysis published in the Journal of Public Health Policy that explains how Coca-Cola uses contract agreements to influence the public health research it financially supports.
The paper explains that Coca-C ...read more
Citizen Science Day 2019 (#CitSciDay2019) results prove that all of us can make huge contributions to research.
Citizen Science Day is an annual celebration presented by SciStarter and the Citizen Science Association in an effort to connect people to real research in need of their help. It taps the curiosity and observations of people to contribute to significant scientific research efforts.
This year, the featured event of #CitSciDay2019 was the StallCatche ...read more
Using nozzle-like extensions on the side of its head, a tropical velvet worm shoots streams of sticky slime when hunting or defending itself.
Within the fluid are “nanoglobules,” tiny balls made of lipids and proteins. Once the slime hits the target, it’s over fast: The movement of the struggling prey, such as beetles and termites, causes the globules to harden into fibers as strong as nylon, creating a netlike trap that immobilizes the unlucky insect.
Remarkably, the ball-to-f ...read more
