Scientists revealed a new species of armored dinosaur at the Natural History Museum of Utah on Wednesday. The animal, a species of ankylosaur, lived in a wet, tropical environment in what’s now Southern Utah roughly 75 million years ago. The herbivore sported spikes across its head and an intimidating tail club for fending off large predators like the tyrannosaurs that also roamed the landscape. Scientists dubbed it Akainacephalus johnsoni. “Literally tra ...read more

Those fruit flies buzzing around your pantry might be pesky, but to a neuroscientist, they’re a gold mine of information. The insects, tiny though they may be, are surprisingly sophisticated, boasting at least 100,000 neurons in a brain that handles everything from navigating via visual cues to complicated grooming rituals. For years, brain experts have been chiseling away at the daunting task of mapping this tiny insect’s brain, which is about the size of ...read more

You say to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to. You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to. You say Candida krusei, I say Pichia kudriavzevii  — and that should make you a little nervous. OK, so that last bit needs explaining. C. krusei is a drug-resistant yeast species that’s responsible for thousands of potentially fatal infections in the United States every year. P. kudriavzevii is a yeast species that’s been widely used for centuries in the ...read more

The deep reefs that lie out of sight of human eyes aren't similarly shielded from our destructive behaviors. A recent study of mesophotic reefs, those lying between 100 and 500 feet below the surface, finds many of the same issues plaguing reefs at shallower depths. It's overturning previous theories that deep reefs might be protected by virtue of their remote location, and that they could potentially serve as a haven of sorts for imperiled species living in shallower areas. Brand New Da ...read more

Plants dominate life on Earth, making up more than 80 percent of biomass as measured in gigatons of carbon. On land, plants today boast a wide range of complex shapes, from stout baobab trees to winding ivy, but they all evolved from a simpler past. Land plants trace their roots to aquatic algae that were limited to pretty much two options when it came to structure: stringy or flat. But somewhere along the way, these early plants learned to grow in a multitude of shapes to adapt to l ...read more

Fire at will! Researchers present evidence that Neanderthals were just as capable of producing fire as early Homo sapiens were, sending another long-held notion of our species' exceptionalism up in smoke. I'm not just fanning the flames here: The question of whether our closest evolutionary kin used fire the same way our ancestors did has been a controversial one for decades, and its debate mirrors broader trends in paleoanthropology. Members of the genus Homo appear t ...read more

Although NOAA's just-released analysis differs somewhat, both show that June 2018 continued the long-term global warming trend Last month tied with June 1998 as the third warmest such month since 1880. Only June 2015 and 2016 were warmer, according to the monthly analysis released this week by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Today, the National Oceanic and Administration issued its own, independent analysis, ...read more

Snakes alive! Preserved in a piece of amber about the size of a small potato, a tiny snake hatchling — less than two inches long — is unprecedented in the fossil record. At nearly 100 million years old, the baby snake's remains provide researchers with significant new information about the animals' development and global distribution. But wait, there's more... The early Late Cretaceous hatchling, from Myanmar's northern Kachin province, was donated to rese ...read more

A new origami-inspired robotic claw that looks like a cross between a flower and a crab pincer could help marine biologists capture delicate underwater organisms currently unknown to science. The oceans are the largest and least-explored habitats on Earth, with some estimates suggesting that up to a million unknown species lurk within its deepest waters. Marine biologists typically use submarines or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to grab or scoop life from the seafloor, but plucking se ...read more

We’re not always the same person. The jokes you tell at home aren’t necessarily the ones you tell at work, and I don’t know about you, but I certainly talked differently around my grandmother than I did around my friends. Linguistics people call this tendency code-switching. People are complicated, multi-faceted, and some situations bring out certain qualities in us — it makes sense. But we’re not the ...read more