Forests Feed the Stratosphere Via Monsoons
In the calm years between eruptions, volcanoes have a rival for the upper atmosphere. It has roots, and it may be sending up more than they do.
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The Devil's Arrows Took the Long Way
They hauled enormous stones across prehistoric Yorkshire, apparently ignoring a closer source. Thousands of years later, sticky tape helped reveal where they came from.
Beak Length Changed Faster Than Natural Selection Allows
Beaks on one campus swung up and back at a pace near the top of 2,400 documented cases, yet no population crash was reported. What moved them?
Two Big Aging Events Happen Decades Apart
A program that never knew a single donor's age sorted tissues into three aging schedules, then caught two organs keeping step with each other. The pairing surprised even its authors.
Earth Bacteria Spent Five Days in a Mars Simulation. The Survivors Never Went Dormant.
The survivors had an armored escape hatch and never used it. What they did instead is a headache for anyone trying to keep Earth's germs off other worlds.
Teotihuacan Kept a Map. The Mountain It Named Still Has the Label.
The same mountain written twice: once in Teotihuacan's murals, once on the mountain itself. What was burning beneath the star frame, nobody can say with certainty.
This Moth Can Smell With Its Wings
Cut-off wings, a pair of electrodes and two stinky chemicals. The wings responded. What the moth does with that sense is the part nobody has answered.
Some Families May Be Flipping a Weighted Coin on Baby Sex
In a huge dataset, some families leaned one way, boys or girls, again and again. Two genes tagged along. Why they matter, the researchers say, is an open question.
The Whole Planet Has Tipped Four Times. It's Tipping Now.
The record was sitting in ancient shorelines, not in the rocks everyone had been checking. What does it do to every assumption downstream from "the ground is stable"?
500 Jars on the Seafloor, 2,100 Years Waiting for Someone to Look
A Roman cargo ship went down off Sicily and just stayed there, loaded and perfectly still, while an entire civilization rose and fell above it.
Mount Elgon Elephants Seek the Same Medicinal Plants as Human Neighbors
Elephant mothers on a Kenyan mountain reportedly give certain plants to their calves. Whether it works as medicine, and who taught whom, is still unsettled.
Quantum Mechanics Meets Your Lithium Prescription
Rats given one version of lithium calmed down more than rats given the other. The gap may come down to a quantum property of a single atom's nucleus.
Venus May Have Eaten Its Own Moon
Venus is moonless today. It might have kept a moon for close to 2 billion years. What became of it is the part that keeps the question open.
A Drug Habit Older Than Farming Is Carved Into Two Sets of Teeth
Teeth dug up on Sulawesi have deep grooves and drug residue inside them. Whatever started the habit, the teeth suggest it made things considerably worse.
Dolphins Are Catching Fish With Seashells, and the Kids Are Watching
Two dolphin populations on opposite sides of Australia solved the same puzzle with the same tool. What are the odds they both figured out the shell thing on their own?
A Pig Named Wilma Kept a Man Alive for 271 Days
The kidney failed in the end, and nobody is treating that as a defeat. What a borrowed organ was for turns out to matter more than how long it lasted.
When a Star Steals a Planet, the Moons Go Too
A rogue planet flung into interstellar darkness might not be traveling solo. One of the things it could be dragging along has a hidden ocean in it.
A Feather Survived 66 Million Years Inside a Dinosaur's Dung
Feathers, bird bones and fish scales were packed into one small Montana rock. It records two meals, and the rock is not really a rock.