There’s a new pterosaur in town. A museum curator happened upon a winged carnivorous reptile fossil while checking on another specimen in an area available to amateur fossil hunters. Researchers characterize it as a unique species in Scientific Reports.Finding the New Pterosaur FossilsKronosaurus Korner museum curator Kevin Petersen was visiting a western Queensland, Australia site available to the public with a permit from the Richmond, Australia marine fossil museum. He was checking on a fos ...read more

Biologist and bioengineer Donald E. Ingber doesn’t have time to sleep. As the founding director of The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, finding time outside of work hasn’t gotten easier with age. At 67, his morning still starts at 5 a.m., running through a pile of emails that seems to grow larger by the day.By lunch, he’s already revised the budget for a crucial government grant and met with postdoctoral fellows regarding work on various research ...read more

When the first astronauts returned from space in the 1960s, their health assessments revealed something unexpected. Besides significant loss of muscle and bone mass, they were anemic — meaning their blood contained a lower-than-normal amount of red blood cells. This phenomenon, known as “space anemia,” seems to be an unavoidable part of space travel. It happens to everyone who ventures beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But decades later, scientists still don’t fully understand the process.Wha ...read more

For young male bottlenose dolphins, play is often practice. When that play concerns courtship, practice makes perfect. Juvenile males who spend more time play-acting courtship rituals father more offspring years later as adults, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Study author Livia Gerber, a researcher at University of New South Wales, Sydney, had previously published work showing that adult male alliances form when the dolphins are young. The new study says ...read more

At the start of the pandemic, many people living with diabetes were wondering what COVID-19 meant for them. Diabetes was already known to put people at higher risks from other infectious diseases, including flu. Would it be the same with COVID-19? At the time, all scientists could do was make educated guesses.In 2024, things look very different. A great deal more research is available, as well as effective vaccines, and life has in many ways returned to something like normal.COVID-19 hasn’t di ...read more

Earth is constantly bombarded by fragments of rock and ice, also known as meteoroids, from outer space. Most of the meteoroids are as tiny as grains of sand and small pebbles, and they completely burn up high in the atmosphere. You can see meteoroids larger than about a golf ball when they light up as meteors or shooting stars on a dark, clear night.While very small meteoroids are common, larger ones – bigger than a dishwasher – are not.Meteoroids are difficult objects for aerospace and geop ...read more

Whether it was human sacrifice, treasure tossed into sacred sinkholes, or rituals surrounding resource extraction from the land, the ancient Maya had a rich worldview that involved a close reciprocal relationship with their gods. But what did the ancient Maya have to do to avoid the inconvenience of an apocalyptic reset, or at least keep the gods happy enough to favor new temples or even small homes? According to archaeologists, it depended a lot on the time, place, and scale of the occasion.Why ...read more

During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.” That isn’t true anymore.Since then, science and technology have progressed so much that artificial intelligence has learned to compose DNA, and with genetically modified bacteria, scientists are on their way to designing and making bespoke proteins.The goal is that with AI’s designing talents and gene editing� ...read more

Elephants engage in name-calling, according to a new report in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Unlike a few other animals — like dolphins and parrots — that respond to others imitating their signature call, an elephant’s name is its own separate word.This finding was born in the field, but confirmed with experiments. It’s been well established that one elephant can signal an entire group with what Joyce Poole, cofounder of Elephant Voices, a nonprofit organization that researches elephant ...read more

The Sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.The Sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma – highly energized ionized gas – called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind, the Sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma cal ...read more