Archeologists have gotten increasingly better at reading the dirt. Over time, they’ve learned to pull more and more data from smaller and smaller samples of Earth. A technique called microstratigraphy pushes that concept to the limit. It allows archeologists to detect miniscule traces of human and animal presence that conventional excavation techniques may have missed.Although not considered a new methodology, a team applied it to a site in Southeast Asia and reconstructed the ground condition ...read more

One definitive way to link ecological changes to evolution would require a time machine. Traveling both backward and forward would allow observers to see how particular animals adapt to changes in climate, environment, or other variables.Since no such machine exists — except in the movies — a group of researchers leaned on the next best thing: data and experiments. By doing so, this group is the first to link ecological changes to a species’ adaptation — a phenomenon known as "speciation ...read more

Palo santo has quickly become a mainstay and trendy product sought after for its stated spiritual and medicinal properties, as well as its fragrant scent. Literally meaning “holy wood” in Spanish it’s related to the same family of plants as frankincense and myrrh and its uses dates back hundreds of years.Where Palo Santo Comes FromPalo santo, also known by its scientific name of Bursera graveolens, comes from a shrub or tree that is native to tropical dry forests in many South and Central ...read more

The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry recognized Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker for using machine learning to tackle one of biology’s biggest challenges: predicting the 3D shape of proteins and designing them from scratch.This year’s award stood out because it honored research that originated at a tech company: DeepMind, an AI research startup that was acquired by Google in 2014. Most previous chemistry Nobel Prizes have gone to researchers in academia. Many laureates went on to fo ...read more

If your jaw dropped as you watched the latest AI-generated video, your bank balance was saved from criminals by a fraud detection system, or your day was made a little easier because you were able to dictate a text message on the run, you have many scientists, mathematicians, and engineers to thank.But two names stand out for foundational contributions to the deep learning technology that makes those experiences possible: Princeton University physicist John Hopfield and University of Toronto com ...read more

My Octopus Teacher — a documentary about the smarts of cephalopods — inspired a team of engineers to create materials that can grab and release objects with rough and irregular surfaces. Those novel materials, which have many potential uses — from helping people with disabilities to better grab objects to creating robots to assist in underwater cleanup — are presented in an Advanced Science report.Michael Bartlett, the lead investigator in the study and engineering professor at Virginia ...read more

A series of underwater caves off the southern coast of Sicily holds clues about Ice Age-era human migration. A team of ‘citizen scientists’ — including a tugboat captain and both recreational and Italian navy divers — helped discover them.The findings, reported in PLOS ONE, describe 25 caves and rock shelters that show signs of human occupation from about 17,000 years ago. Many scholars consider Sicily to be among the first islands humans settled in the Mediterranean. In this case, the r ...read more

Hundreds of industrial facilities with toxic pollutants are in Hurricane Milton’s path as it heads toward Florida, less than two weeks after Hurricane Heleneflooded communities across the Southeast.Milton, expected to make landfall as a major hurricane late on Oct. 9, is bearing down on boat and spa factories along Florida’s west-central coast, along with the rubber, plastics, and fiberglass manufacturers that supply them. Many of these facilities use tens of thousands of registered contamin ...read more

Humanity’s impact on the climate is clear and devastating. Over the last two hundred years or so, we have pumped enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to significantly increase its temperature and raise the frightening prospect of much of the Earth becoming uninhabitable. The current plan to avoid this fate is to reduce net carbon emissions to zero within the next 20 years. That will surely help, provided Earth has not moved beyond any significant tipping points by then.But there is anothe ...read more

Of all the hazards that hurricanes bring, storm surge is the greatest threat to life and property along the coast. It can sweep homes off their foundations, flood riverside communities miles inland, and break up dunes and levees that normally protect coastal areas against storms.As a hurricane reaches the coast, it pushes a huge volume of ocean water ashore. This is what we call storm surge.This surge appears as a gradual rise in the water level as the storm approaches. Depending on the size and ...read more