Another day, another bioinspired drone. But this microrobot, powered through a wire tether, can launch itself through the air and into water — then blast itself back into the air. Harvard researchers have been working on bee-like robots for years, and a new study published Wednesday in Science Robotics shows more advancement. Scientists showed the little bot could successfully hover in the air, transition from air to water, swim, takeoff from the water and land on the ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Chinese scientists say they’ve found a way to take some of the sizzle out of our bacon. Though that sounds worrying, it was actually done with the pigs’ health in mind. Pigs are so notoriously porky in part because they lack a gene, UCP1, that helps burn fat to generate heat. The result is plumper pigs, but it also poses an increased risk for newborns that can die if they’re not kept warm enough. Porky No More With the gene-editing technology ...read more

Can you tell if this monkey’s depressed or not? Don’t be so sure. (Credit: By Lorna Roberts/Shutterstock) Anxiety and depression have become something of a modern plague, with the NIH estimating that some 16 million adults in the US experienced at least one major depressive episode in 2015. For young people, rates of depression are even higher, and they appear to be getting worse still. To get a handle on illness, researchers often turn to animal models, and depression and anxiety ...read more

The Aitape skull was discovered in Papua New Guinea in 1929, and researchers say it has revealed that the person most likely died in a catastrophic tsunami. (Credit: Arthur Durband) Tsunamis have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the past two decades. Now a new study finds that a 6,000-year-old skull may come from the earliest known victim of these killer waves. The partial human skull was discovered in 1929 buried in a mangrove swamp outside the small town of Aitape Papua New Guinea, ...read more

Known so far only from its giant footprints, a new Southern African mega-carnivore is believed to be the region’s largest dinosaur predator ever. (Credit Fabian Knoll and Lara Sciscio) My, what big feet you have…200-million-year-old dinosaur footprints found in the mountainous Southern African country of Lesotho are unique within the Southern Hemisphere and the largest of their kind ever discovered on the continent. But size isn’t the only thing that matters about the mega-ca ...read more

(Credit: Liya Graphics/Shutterstock) The human genome is composed of some 3 billion base pairs, the individual molecules that compose our DNA. A mutation to just a single base pair can have dramatic consequences if it occurs in certain locations. Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and more are caused by point mutations, or aberrations in just a single letter of our DNA. Those letters, A, T, C and G, represent the four molecules, or nucleotides, that comprise the alphabet of ...read more

Editor’s Note: Today starts the beginning of Bat Week and there are many opportunities for citizen scientists to get involved. Below, we have reposted an article from 2015 on the popular online project Bat Detective. Want to support more bat projects? Check out SciStarter to find a list of fun possibilities.  by Kristin Butler About fifteen of us were gathered in a classroom one Thursday evening last month on San Francisco’s South Bay. We were there to hear a talk as part ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Many forces shape the planet’s rugged features: wind, water, fire, and, of course, salmon sex. That’s the conclusion from Washington State University researcher Alex Fremier and colleagues in a study that’s billed as one of the first attempts to quantify the earth-shaping power of spawning salmon. They titled their study, in part, “Sex That Moves Mountains,” and it’s a new take on the ways living things transform habitats. Take Me to t ...read more