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Vitamin — the first four letters come from the Latin word for “life.” To sustain that, we need these organic compounds in small amounts, but it seems their purpose ends there.
New research reaffirms the counterintuitive notion that vitamin and mineral supplements aren’t the magical panacea we’ve been led to believe. It’s something that researchers have been finding for years, and a meta-analysis, summarizing the ...read more
Human brains are three times bigger than those of our ancestors. Researchers behind a pair of new studies think they’ve found the genes responsible. (Credit Fiddes et al)
With a new pair of studies on a handful of genes unique to the genus Homo, researchers took a big step toward solving one of the most important questions about our evolution — why and how human brains got so big.
Understanding why the Homo brain became significantly larger than th ...read more
Life recolonized the Chicxulub impact crater so fast that bones from now-extinct animals, like this mosasaur, might not have fully decayed yet. (Credit: John Maisano, University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences)
Around 66 million years ago, a city-sized space rock splashed into the Gulf of Mexico and killed 75 percent of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. We all know that story.
But — at least for the survivors — the aftermath might not have been as hellish as we thought ...read more
The lava fountain from Fissure 8 seen on May 28, 2018. USGS/HVO.
Few things are changing volcano monitoring and hazard planning than drones. A decade ago, it either took expensive and dangerous helicopter flights or approaching eruptions on foot. Today, we can watch volcanic eruptions and their results up close using relatively cheap drones that can fly into craters and over lava flows to see what is happening. This provides vital data for volcanologists watching the volcano to understand how th ...read more
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From freezing showers to ingesting prickly pear to smoking joints, everyone has a home remedy for alcohol’s notorious afterglow: the hangover. Mongolian men swear by pickled sheep eyes, ancient Egyptians wore necklaces of Alexandrian laurel, and one 17th century English physician even sold a hangover “cure” made with human skulls and dried vipers.
Hangovers are a problem that even predates writing. But today with the aid of modern med ...read more
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While the world’s population is steadily increasing, the number of spoken languages is actually decreasing.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) looked at factors like intergenerational language transmission, total number of speakers and percentage of speakers within a population, and found that about 2,700 of the world’s 6,700 languages, each carrying generations of worldviews and cultural traditions, a ...read more
A shifted version of the Arecibo message transmitted in 1974, showing what it might look like if laid out incorrectly as a 73 x 23 grid instead of 23 x 73. (Credit: Jarmo kivekas)
Projects like SETI and Breakthrough Listen are dedicated to spotting the signals extraterrestrials may be sending out into the universe. But there’s an additional side to the story — if E.T. did contact us, would we even be able to understand him? That was the topic of a recent gathering of linguists that ...read more
(Credit: Christos Georghiou/Shutterstock)
In 2016, the National Institutes of Health introduced a regulation to address a growing issue in clinical research — sex differences. Until then, most work that relied on animal models tended to use only male critters. The trend was problematic, particularly since any drug therapies based on these studies often worked differently once females were factored into the equation.
Since the recent push for more balance, researchers are discovering ...read more
