Public health guidelines, such as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, have long emphasized reducing dietary fat intake, but nutritionists and other health scientists now have more recent evidence that not all fats have adverse effects. Dietary fats differ with regard to their effects on health and risk for chronic diseases, particularly in regard to effects on risk for heart disease. Indeed, some nutrition experts now believe that certain types of dietary fat may even reduce cardiovascu ...read more

The 1950s were a bizarre period in American history. An economic boom brought joy to a generation home from war, and also harbored a strange level of distrust, of enemies both internal and external, in a nation not quite at war, but not quite at peace either. Technology was advancing in leaps and bounds, and the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union was underway. To America's dismay, the Soviets were winning – at least at first. But before ...read more

A dinosaur relative about the size of an iguana, which lived at the bottom of the world 250 million years ago, is throwing paleontologists for a loop. Antarctanax shackletoni, named for explorer Ernest Shackleton, hints at unexpected biodiversity on the now-frozen continent of Antarctica. About 252 million years ago, the greatest mass extinction known walloped life on Earth. An estimated 90 percent of all living things perished. In the wake of this event, known as the end-Permian or Gre ...read more

Most parents’ first glimpse of their children comes in ultrasound images taken months before birth. But ultrasound could soon offer much more than prenatal portraits. In the past few years, researchers have opened a new door for ultrasound, developing techniques that harness the familiar, safe and noninvasive sound waves to control genes, alter brain function and deliver drugs to targets with millimeter precision. The advance of what’s being termed sonogenetics offers a new twist on ...read more

Sea stars, also commonly called starfish, are among the most abundant animals along the U.S. West Coast. But now scientists say an epidemic spurred by warming ocean waters is decimating sunflower sea stars, a critical predator in kelp forests. The sea stars’ collapse could wipe out the shallow water ecosystems that provide a home for seals, sea otters and commercially important fish. “The epidemic was catastrophic and widespread,” said Drew Harvell, a marine ecologist at Corne ...read more

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that their digital appearance is based on their “residual self-image.” That is, the characters look how they imagine themselves to look, based on their own mental models of themselves. In the real world, scientists have been trying to teach robots that trick as well. That's because, unlike the warring machines of the matrix, a real-life robot with an accurate self-image might benefit humanity. It’d allow for faster programming and more accura ...read more

Nestled in the foothills of southern Siberia's Altai Mountains, Denisova Cave has yielded numerous artifacts, as well as fossils of many animals and at least two hominins: Neanderthals and Denisovans. The cave is the only place in the world known to have remains of the Denisovans, who, like Neanderthals, were our close evolutionary cousins. The site is one of the most significant for understanding human evolution, but study of it has been hampered by difficulty dating the finds. Today ...read more

The brain of a fruit fly is captured here using a new, large-scale 3-D imaging technique developed by a multi-institutional group of researchers led by MIT and Harvard University. The method is shockingly fast, and millions of synapses can be analyzed in just a few days. That's much faster than previously possible. The technique makes use of expanding brain tissue and what’s called lattice light-sheet microscopy. Here, the fruit fly brain is about the size of a poppy s ...read more

Opportunity's Last Hope Last Martian summer, a dust storm blocked out the sun and grew until it enveloped the entire Red Planet. That left the Opportunity rover deprived of solar power and NASA lost contact with the robot. Now, after six months without a response, NASA is making a new, and potentially their last, effort to restore contact with the rover. The last contact that Opportunity had with Earth was on June 10, 2018, in the midst of the global dust storm. NASA’s Jet ...read more

What, if anything, is the function of adult neurogenesis in humans? Does neurogenesis even exist in our adult brains, or does it shut down during childhood? The debate over human neurogenesis has been one of the most prominent disputes in 21st century neuroscience. Just last year, two opposing papers appeared in leading journals, one claiming firm evidence of ongoing neurogenesis in the adult human dentate gyrus, while the other study came to the opposite conclusion. The fact that adult neuro ...read more