Without those eight or so hours of precious shut-eye, many of us feel dazed, sluggish and downright useless. Sleep might be thought of as the great equalizer — birds do it, bees do it, every animal with a brain does it. But a new study suggests that might not be quite right after all. A study published today in the journal Science Advances found that some members of a species of fruit fly could, to the jealousy of humans, function on practically no sleep. After being kept awake for severa ...read more

Zebras are famous for their contrasting black and white stripes – but until very recently no one really knew why they sport their unusual striped pattern. It’s a question that’s been discussed as far back as 150 years ago by great Victorian biologists like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Since then many ideas have been put on the table but only in the last few years have there been serious attempts to test them. These ideas fall into four main categories: Zebras are ...read more

Testosterone often gets a bad rap as the cause of male aggression, but the hormone actually interacts with our bodies in far more, and more complex, ways. Now, in a new study in mice, researchers find that testosterone protects embryos from harm by reducing inflammation during development. It's a new role for the hormone, and one that could prove beneficial to humans, the researchers say. Female Fatality Genetics researcher John Schimenti and his research team at Cornell Universit ...read more

Neptune has a new moon, and it's also the gas giant's smallest to date — only a little over 20 miles across. The brand new satellite is called Hippocamp. Astronomers led by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute discovered it using the Hubble Space Telescope combined with an innovative method to track dim and tiny objects as they orbit. Because the object is so tiny, there’s still a lot astronomers don’t know about Hippocamp, named after a Greek sea monster in ke ...read more

Some 45,000 years ago, the tropical rainforests of Sri Lanka teemed with dangerous plants and lacked big game, yet people made a life there. Our key to success in that seemingly inhospitable region? It was monkeys and squirrels, researchers say — or rather, our ability to catch them. “These animals are difficult to catch and suggest a certain level of sophistication in terms of hunting strategies,” said Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the ...read more

Why did the hominin cross the plain? We may never know. But anthropologists are pretty sure that a smattering of bare footprints preserved in volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania bear witness to an evolutionary milestone. These small steps, taken roughly 3.5 million years ago, mark an early successful attempt by our common human ancestor to stand upright and stride on two feet, instead of four. Nearly 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong also took a few small steps. On the moon. His bootprints, al ...read more

Supermassive black holes lurk in the hearts of every large galaxy. Some blast out jets that can spill into its host galaxy or even beyond. The energy carried by the jets is deposited in the surrounding material, playing a crucial role in the evolution of the galaxy and, in extreme cases, other galaxies nearby. And thanks to recent observations of the famous galaxy Cygnus A with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have gotten a closer glimpse at just how those jets work — and ho ...read more

Tears often leave our faces feeling (and tasting) salty, but a closer look reveals the intricate patterns they can leave behind. Norm Barker, director of pathology photography at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, focused his microscope on a human teardrop, using a lighting technique to enhance contrast. Barker saw that as it started to dry, the salt and other substances in the teardrop bunched together and crystalized in these intricate, snowflakelike shapes. The picture ran ...read more

As technology advances, so do our fears about it. Socrates himself didn’t care for the new advancement of writing. And my parents were always on me to watch less TV. Yet now as a parent, I’m always trying to limit how much screentime my 3-year-old spends with a phone or tablet. After all, everyone knows little kids are drawn to those portable devices like moths to a touch-sensitive flame, right? Not so fast, suggests a study this week in JAMA Pediatrics. De ...read more

The town of Kabwe sits about 70 miles north of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, as the crow flies. Just over 200,000 people live in this major transportation crossroads. Like most of this south-central African nation, Kabwe is perched on a high and vast plateau, a land of red soils dotted with shrubby legumes and canopies of small, spindly miombo trees. Kabwe’s story is defined in part by a mine that opened in the early 1900s after rich deposits of lead and zinc were discovered on the edge ...read more