Uncategorized
- Animals
Secrets of slime
Mucus—snot—can be so gross. It’s also critical for many animals, including hagfish, snails and people. Snot can rid our bodies of nasty bacteria and viruses. In other creatures, it can smooth the road or rough up predators.
- Humans
Neandertals create oldest jewelry in Europe
Adorned with all-natural signs of power: eagle claws. Holes in these claws show that Neandertals had been strung them together, like beads, as jewelry.
- Chemistry
Cooking up life for the first time
The basic components for life could have emerged together nearly 4 billion years ago on the surface of Earth, chemists report.
- Materials Science
New mirror picky in what it reflects
A new type of mirror is selective in the light it reflects. It allows some wavelengths of radiation to pass through, while others bounce off.
- Animals
Scientists Say: Irruption
Sometimes populations of animals can suddenly increase. The word for that is irruption.
- Animals
Why you’ll never see a dirty gecko
By knowing how a gecko’s skin works, could self-cleaning, water-repelling, antibacterial clothes be far behind?
- Chemistry
Goopy tech leaves older 3-D printing in its wake
A new way of 3-D printing combines light and oxygen to create solid objects from liquid resin. The method quickly creates detailed objects.
- Chemistry
Silencing genes — to understand them
Hijacking a cell process called RNA interference can let scientists turn off a selected gene. Its silencing can point to what genes do when they’re on — and may lead to new treatments for disease.
- Microbes
Life’s ultra-slow lane is deep beneath the sea
Biologists had suspected the deep seafloor would be little more than barren sediment. But they found a surprising amount of oxygen — and life.
- Earth
Explainer: Understanding plate tectonics
Plate tectonics is the process whereby Earth continually rebuilds itself — and causes destructive events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
- Climate
Arctic warming bolsters summer heat
Rapid warming in the Arctic is sapping summer storms of their power to cool. That worsens heat waves across the Northern Hemisphere.
- Computing
3-D Recycling: Grind, melt, print!
A new 2-in-1 desktop machine quickly recycles plastic trash into low-cost 3-D printer ‘ink’ at the push of a button.
