More Than Half the Memory Connections Disappeared. The Memories Didn't.
The brain can lose more than half its memory-related connections and still remember. What got preserved, and why, is the part science hasn't figured out yet.
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Ireland's Famous "Kerry Cow" Was Never a Cow
Ireland's earliest evidence of farming wasn't farming at all. The bones that rewrote prehistory for three decades have rewritten themselves, and what replaced the cow is stranger.
A Living Circuit Board Just Ran Calculations Inside a Petri Dish
Five bacterial strains. Two transistor types. One living circuit board doing arithmetic in a petri dish. What gets built when biology becomes the hardware?
A Pill Full of Bacteria Could Read Your Blood Sugar
Engineered gut bacteria that sense rising blood sugar and manufacture a drug on demand. It worked in monkeys. Humans are the open question.
Thousands of Tonnes of Uranium May Have Left Congo Labeled as Cobalt
The DRC's Copperbelt supplies 70 percent of the world's cobalt. Turns out it may have been shipping something extra. Does anyone know where thousands of tonnes of uranium went?
Rock-Eating Organisms Thrive Beneath the Great Lakes
689 fungal species have been quietly eating rock 1,000 feet underground for 11,000 years. What else is down there that we haven't thought to look for?
Life-Ready Shapes Are Folding Inside Venus's Acid Clouds
The building blocks of life just survived weeks in near-pure sulfuric acid, and folded into functional shapes. Venus's clouds may have been hiding something.
Mammals Have One Antibody System. Bats Didn't Get the Memo.
Bats carry Ebola, coronaviruses and worse without breaking a sweat. Turns out they may have been running a completely different immune system.
This Microbe Grows Its Young Inside Itself. Then It Explodes.
A newly discovered microbe doesn't split in two like ordinary cells. It grows its young inside itself, then bursts open to release them, and what's happening inside before that happens is stranger than it sounds.
Saturn's North Pole Has a Hexagon. The South Pole One-Upped It.
A giant new atmospheric shape has appeared around Saturn's south pole, big enough to swallow eight Earths. Scientists can't say when it formed, only that it wasn't there before.
Juan Seguín Helped Win Texas Independence. Then Texas Drove Him Out.
Juan Seguín warned Texas its enemies were coming. Months later, he was riding with them.
Antarctica Gained Five Years' Worth of Ice in Less Than Two. The Cause Was Thousands of Miles Away.
A tropical ocean pattern rerouted moisture across the globe, and for nearly two years it reversed decades of loss on one continent. The connection recurs about once a decade and remains only partly understood.
A 245-Million-Year-Old Reptile Went Into the Rock and Kept Its Lunch
A quarter-billion-year-old fossil still had a liver, and it was still red. What else survived besides the bones?
Lab-Grown Brain Cells Know How Old They Are
Scientists spent five years watching a dish of stem cells grow like an actual human organ. Then they tried to reset part of it. Something unexpected came along for the ride.
Greek Elites Wore Extraterrestrial Rings
Out of 91 ancient iron objects tested, only the signet pieces came back carrying the chemical signature of meteorites.
Someone Stabbed This Man in the Face 100,000 Years Ago. He Survived.
A stone blade cut across Qafzeh 25's jaw. His bone healed. The injury may be one of the oldest known examples of sharp-force violence between humans.
The Ocean Floor Dropped 13 Feet in Six Days
The seafloor moved at half a million times its normal spreading rate while an observatory happened to be sitting on top of it.
A Seal's Ears Fill With Blood When It Dives
Scientists just found the missing piece of an underwater hearing system hidden in plain sight for decades. The engineering behind it looks more like hydraulics than anatomy.