In 2010, extraordinary circumstances allowed geneticists to reconstruct the first full genome of an ancient human: the DNA came from a hairball, frozen 4,000 years in Greenland soil. Since then, methods have improved so much in cost and efficiency that individual papers now report genomic data from hundreds of dead people (here, here, here). Ancient DNA (aDNA) has now been published from well over 2,000 human ancestors, stretching as far back as 430,000 years ago. But around 70 percent of ...read more

(Inside Science) -- There are enough nuclear weapons in the world to cause atomic Armageddon many times over, according to scientists, who estimate that no country could fire more than 100 nuclear warheads without wreaking such devastation that their own citizens back home would be killed. Most nuclear nations recognized by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- namely, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States -- have set about reducing their arsenals. C ...read more

Like humans throughout history, it turns out that dung beetles are celestial navigators. Steering is important to dung beetles. When a choice load drops, they want to grab their ball and roll away in as straight a line as they can manage. In this sense, they’re not so much navigating (which implies a destination), but they are orienting themselves by the skies. Dung beetles who work during the day can use the sun. But nocturnal dung beetles rely on moonlight – and that waxes and wan ...read more

Meanwhile, the Earth as a whole continues to ride the up-escalator of human-caused global warming Two U.S. agencies have reported on how Earth's climate fared in 2018. For the most part, the news wasn't all that surprising: The long-term trend of human-caused global warming showed no significant signs of relenting. But I was surprised by one finding: The United States experienced something of a split climatic personality last year. More about that in a minute. First, though, NASA a ...read more

When it comes to intelligence, fish get a bad rap. They’ve been plagued with the five-second memory stereotype, and thanks to Dory, are thought to “just keep swimming.” But a new study suggests that they might be smarter than we think. Research published today in the journal PLOS Biology shows that fish can recognize and respond to themselves in the mirror. When met with their own reflections, a species of fish called the cleaner wrasse identified and attempted to remove marks ...read more

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is one of the most beautiful cosmic sights that a southern observer can take in with their naked eye. At just over 150,000 light-years from Earth, this large(ish) satellite galaxy of the Milky Way is roughly 14,000 light-years wide and bursting with newly formed stars. Recently, astronomers homed in on a particularly fertile region of the LMC named LHA 120-N 180B — informally known as N180 B. This nebula, which serves as a sort of stellar nursery, is chock ...read more

Honey bees are a great study system to learn about the animal kingdom. They dance (albeit sloppily), they make jelly that turns their larvae into queens, they have crazy tongues … I could go on. Now, researchers have found, honeybees can add. In a paper out today in Science Advances, a team led by Adrian Dyer at RMIT University in Melbourne put the honey-makers’ arithmetic skills to the test. Instead of written numbers and symbols, they used colors to communicate with the bees. Blu ...read more

More than 21 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, a profound mental illness that interrupts thinking, language and perception. Quite a few schizophrenic people experience delusions and hear voices. Many of the disease’s symptoms stem from faulty communication between brain cells. And, for decades, scientists have searched for a cure in the brain. Now researchers say they've discovered that the way to heal schizophrenia might be through the gut. There's an ecosystem of bacte ...read more

While many people think of cancer as a modern plague, researchers continue to find examples of tumors in animals much older than our own species. Discovery of bone cancer in a very early member of the turtle lineage, which lived 240 million years ago, reveals new information about the disease and just how long it's been a scourge to living things. The aggressive osteosarcoma was found in the femur of Pappochelys rosinae, a roughly 240 million-year-old reptile. Though you might m ...read more

Imagine lying in a hospital bed, conscious, but unable to convey that to the world around you. For sufferers of strokes, traumatic brain injuries or the ever-terrifying locked-in syndrome, it’s not just nightmare fuel — it's reality for some patients. What’s potentially more frightening is that neuroscience hasn’t landed on a way to truly test for consciousness. That's not for a lack of trying. But a new paper published in Science Advances could help pave the way for ...read more