As artists and toddlers have long known, paints can provide lots of entertainment. But, not every part of the process is fun: Watching paint dry is synonymous with boredom, like watching the grass grow. It’s almost too bad, because there’s where the magic happens. The (usually) liquid paint drying, and becoming solid, is what gives the art (or school project, or bedroom wall) its longevity, its permanence. You can erase pencil and even some inks, but dried paint is there to stay. T ...read more

We’ve sent rovers to explore neighboring planets and moons, but we can now check another near-Earth target off of the list. On September 21, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully deployed two rovers on to the surface of asteroid Ryugu, becoming the first in history to accomplish such a feat. Once there, rover-1A and 1B were quick to get to work. They began exploring the surface, snapping pictures and taking videos, giving us a long-awaited ground-level view of an ...read more

FLORES, Guatemala — From above, the vastness of the Guatemalan jungle stretches to the horizon in an unbroken swath of dense greenery. On the ground, the forest blends into a blur of foliage. The only sounds are the clamor of cicadas and howler monkeys. But to step through the undergrowth in the northern Guatemalan lowlands is to walk the buried remnants of the ancient Maya civilization. The jungle hides fields, roads, canals and even whole settlements. And that civilization jus ...read more

With a machete, Gildardo Ramirez lops twelve pods off one of his cacao trees, letting them fall to its base. The long, brown pods look like twisted and deflated footballs. Each cacao pod usually encases about 40 beans — the source of cocoa powder and chocolate. The beans are the main commodity that Ramirez produces on his farm in San Francisco, Colombia, some 70 miles southeast of the city of Medellín. On Ramirez’s land, cacao’s red and green leaves fill the sloping hill ...read more

When researchers created a vaccine, they largely put an end to the 2013 bird flu pandemics in chickens, capping a worldwide health scare. But now, scientists have found new versions of the viruses in ducks. Researchers recommend vaccinating the nearly 3 billion ducks produced in China each year straightaway. Virulent Virus Back in 2013, authorities detected H7N9, a version of the flu that infects birds, in Chinese poultry markets. Soon after, they found the viruses in chicken farms. Th ...read more

They're among the most iconic of dinosaurs: the sauropods, long-necked, long-tailed herbivores that evolved into the largest land animals the planet has ever seen. They were essentially the cows of their day. Very, very big cows. But they didn't start out that way. A new dinosaur unearthed in South Africa reveals there are more plot twists to the sauropod story than we thought. Ledumahadi mafube, the "giant thunderclap at dawn," weighed in at about 12 metric tons, or upwards of 26,000 pou ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. Hear the word “antenna” and you might think about rabbit ears on the top of an old TV or the wire that picks up radio signals for a car. But an antenna can be much smaller – even invisible. No matter its shape or size, an antenna is crucial for communication, transmitting and receiving radio signals between devices. As portable electronics become increasingly common, antennas must, too. Wearable monitors, flex ...read more

Brown tree snakes, Boiga irregularis, are one of Guam's most successful - and devastating - invasive species. That's prompted an international team of scientists, led by the University of Queensland, to study what's made the species so successful. And their venom and traveling ability is the key, according to research published this month in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. With a venom that’s 100 times more toxic to birds than mammals, brown tree snakes have devastated Guam’s ...read more