New findings prompt a rethinking of group labor and ritual in ancient hunter-gatherer communities. Archaeologists have discovered Africa’s oldest known cremation pyre at the base of Mount Hora in Malawi. According to a paper published in the journal Science Advances, radiocarbon testing dates the site to about 9,500 years…
The European Union now prohibits desflurane’s use during most procedures. Desflurane is a common anesthetic used in hospital operating rooms worldwide. It’s also a climate super pollutant. Now, several decades after the drug was first introduced, a growing number of US hospitals have stopped using the anesthetic because of…
Rogue, free-floating planets appear to have two distinct origins. Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been in relatively tight orbits around their host stars, allowing us to track them as they repeatedly loop around them. But we’ve also discovered a handful of planets through a phenomenon that’s called…
Double-detonating “superkilonova,” Roman liquid gypsum burials, biomechanics of kangaroo posture, and more. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This…
This time, a Colorado plant scheduled to shut down will be kept on standby. On Tuesday, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued a now familiar order: because of a supposed energy emergency, a coal plant scheduled for closure would be forced to remain open. This time, the order…
The study’s main takeaway: “Be bold. It is the thing that slows down authoritarian creep.” Freedom of speech is a foundational principle of healthy democracies and hence a primary target for aspiring authoritarians, who typically try to squash dissent. There is a point where the threat from authorities is…
Settlement forces NIH to review grants previously rejected on ideological grounds. On Monday, the ACLU announced that it and other organizations representing medical researchers had reached a settlement in their suit against the federal government over grant applications that had been rejected under a policy that has since been…
Gathering for mutual defense puts young spiny lobsters at risk of predators. Lobsters are generally notable for their large claws, which can serve as a deterrent to any predators. But there’s a whole family of spiny lobsters that lack these claws. They tend to ward off predators by forming…
Yakisugi, a Japanese technique of burning wood surfaces, creates a protective carbonized layer Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan…
Information from sensors is transmitted using neural-style activity spikes. The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they…
