3+ hour, 34+ min ago   (530+ words) The extinct American cheetah wasn’t a true cheetah at all, say biologists in new research overturning our previous understanding of the legendary predator, revealing a cautionary tale about superficial scientific interpretations. In a recent paper published in Current Biology, a…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (863+ words) Mysterious human bones dredged from the seafloor between Taiwan and the Penghu Islands several years ago are providing new insights into the appearance—and the large size—of one of the last ancient human relatives to share the planet with…...

1+ mon, 1+ day ago   (658+ words) An international research team has uncovered how LUCA, the last common ancestor of all life on Earth, split into the first two branches of organisms—bacteria and archaea—allowinglife to thrive innew conditions and spread to other biomes. Scientists from…...

1+ mon, 2+ day ago   (338+ words) The silvery fur of the hamadryas baboon is, under a spectrometer, nearly the exact color of moonlight, which may explain why ancient Egyptians made a monkey the face of their moon god, according to a new study in Time and…...

1+ mon, 3+ day ago   (599+ words) Botanists are still proving Charles Darwin right with their recent identification of a new carnivorous plant growing in China’s mountainous forests. Saxifraga candelabrum is a small, yellow flower with a taste for flesh that may one day help protect endangered…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (898+ words) For decades, paleoanthropologists have largely agreed that somewhere along the evolutionary course from apelike ancestors to modern humans, our bodies got dramatically larger. However, one lingering mystery has been when this intense growth began. Did our ancestors gradually grow bigger…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (537+ words) An international team of geophysicists examining the Southern Indian Ocean floor witnessed a section greater than two meters split apart, releasing millions of cubic meters of stored-up magma within just a few days. Jean-Yves Royer, a marine geophysicist at the…...

1+ mon, 4+ week ago   (523+ words) An unusual phenomenon that has been recognized around the world for more than a century has finally been resolved: what are the origins of the distinctive, stair-like ridges that form on steep hillsides? These features, known as “terracettes,” have long…...

3+ mon, 4+ hour ago   (522+ words) An analysis of dental tartar containing traces of human diets dating back over 33,000 years has revealed that ancient Europeans and many early Asian populations likely only ate insects by accident, perhaps as larvae in the carcasses of dead animals. Conversely,…...

3+ mon, 4+ day ago   (624+ words) An international team of researchers studying 520-million-year-old rocks from the Xiannüdong Formation of southern Shaanxi Province, China, has discovered Bryozoan fossils from the Cambrian explosion, an era when essentially all other major animal groups on Earth were already represented in…...