Category Science

Skeleton of the new plesiosaur at the Urwelt-Museum Hauff in Holzmaden, Germany Klaus Nilkens/Urwelt-Museum Hauff The soft tissue of a plesiosaur has been studied in detail for the first time, revealing that the marine reptiles, which lived during the age…

February 5, 2025 4 min read To Find Life on Mars, Make Microbes Wiggle Could tiny swimming microbes help us unlock the mysteries of extraterrestrial life? By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings A color-enhanced microscopic view of Bacillus subtilis…

How do you cook your eggs? The Daniel Heighton Food Collection/Alamy Cooking a perfect boiled egg takes at least half an hour, physicists have claimed, as they say the best method for a tasty and nutritious breakfast involves switching repeatedly…

In the mid-1950s Marthe Gautier, a young French doctor and cytogenetics researcher, led a cutting-edge experiment to investigate the cause of Down syndrome. She painstakingly cultured cells in a ramshackle lab until one day she discovered an extra chromosome in…

Culex pipiens f. molestus is a form of mosquito found in cities all over the world blickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo A form of mosquito associated with the London Underground evolved to live in human environments long before subterranean railways…

For all the world’s linguistic diversity, human languages still obey some universal patterns. These run even deeper than grammar and syntax; they’re rooted in statistical laws that predict how frequently we use certain words and how long those words tend…

Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, believes the journal is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around established scientific consensus. “If you can create the illusion that there is not a predominance of opinion that says, vaccines…

Humpback whales in the South Pacific Tony Wu/Nature Picture Library/Alamy Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our…

Koalas are usually regarded as solitary animals, but new footage is revealing a more gregarious side. Darcy Watchorn at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, filmed male koalas grooming each other, playing, smelling each other’s genitals and spending long periods together in close…

There is a huge hole in our understanding of the brain. A gaping, woman-shaped hole. While neuroscience has given us countless insights into how our minds work, history reveals a major oversight: most of those studies were performed on both…