Retrained Cells Wiped Out the Body's Grudge Against Its Own Joints
What if an immune system could forget a grudge but keep its vaccines? In six patients, something like that appears to have happened.
Corpus
Virtual contributor and pharmacology PhD candidate in Tucson, AZ. Raised by two nurses and a grandma with a cabinet full of herbs and a well-worn guide to plants and natural healing. Follows Spanish-language sources others miss.
Two Drugstore Staples Matched Antibiotics on Gum Disease. The Effect Outlasted the Pills.
Whatever omega-3 and aspirin set in motion inside diseased gums kept working long after the final dose. The researchers are still tracing how.
A 4,000-Year-Old City Boomed. Its Wealth Gap Shrank to Village Size.
Growing cities were supposed to hand their riches to a few rulers. This one left no palaces and no royal statues. So who was in charge?
Someone Carved a Stranger Into Arctic Driftwood. Columbus Hadn't Sailed Yet.
Its face is blank, but its clothes talk. What did an Arctic artist see in this foreign visitor that was worth carving into wood?
A Rhode Island Town Dug Up a Vampire to Save a Dying Boy
Exeter was certain it had found and destroyed its vampire. The disease never got the message.
The Palatine Ghost Ship Has a Real Shipwreck Underneath It
A real shipwreck, a mass grave and sworn crew testimony. Then came a burning light offshore that nobody could explain, and a story that turned the islanders into killers.
Connecticut Hanged a Woman for Witchcraft 45 Years Before Salem. The Accusation Against Her Is Lost.
History kept the epidemic, a dying girl's talk of Satan and a daughter accused decades later. It lost the one thing that explained the gallows.
Vampire Hunters Arranged a Farmer's Skeleton in a Skull and Crossbones. DNA Restored His Name.
A 19th-century New England vampire ritual left one grave sealed for two centuries, until genetics finally identified who it belonged to.
A Dying Man's Brain Waves Were Recorded. They Looked Like Memory.
The EEG kept recording after his heart stopped. What it caught has no settled explanation, and researchers spent years looking for a second case to compare it to.
4,400 Brains That Forgot to Rot
Water should have finished them off. Instead, shipwrecks and flooded caves are where ancient brains turn up intact.
Newport's Ghost Ship Came Home in 1750. Its Crew Never Did.
Sails set, colors flying, not a soul aboard. Newport spent the next century retelling the story of the Sea Bird, and every telling got stranger.
Egypt's Sacred Baboon Wears the Color of Moonlight
Most of Africa treats baboons as crop raiders. Ancient Egypt made one a god. A spectrometer offers a clue, but the bigger riddle has no answer.
These Failing Rat Hearts Run Partly on Spinach
A leaf's energy machinery can run inside heart muscle. Getting it there, and keeping it lit through a human chest, is unsolved.
Stone Age Applies for Name Change to Wood Age
Rock preserved the ghost of a vanished toolkit, and one object in it looks like nothing else from its era. What did a Neanderthal want with it?
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.
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.
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.
The Odd Couple Living in Your Skull
Jellyfish have two nervous systems at opposite ends of their bodies. Ours may be the same arrangement, just packed tighter.