NEW ORLEANS — For couples who have suffered repeated miscarriages, it may be useful to scrutinize the man’s reproductive health as closely as the woman’s. Some miscarriages may be linked to abnormalities in semen, a study finds. Researchers analyzed semen from 49 men whose partners had lost three or more consecutive pregnancies before the 20-week […]
Dumping literal tons of hot volcanic material down a lab flume may finally have revealed how searing mixtures of hot gas and rock travel so far from volcanic eruptions. These pyroclastic flows can travel tens to hundreds of kilometers over rough terrain and even uphill (SN: 7/7/18, p. 32). Despite being made of gritty volcanic […]
ORLANDO — A common food additive may make it more difficult to fight the flu. Vaccinated mice that got food containing the additive, tert-butylhydroquinone (tBHQ), took three days longer to recover from the flu than mice that ate tBHQ-free food. The unpublished result suggests the common additive may make flu vaccines less effective, toxicologist Robert […]
Brains have long been star subjects for neuroscientists. But the typical “brain in a jar” experiments that focus on one subject in isolation may be missing a huge part of what makes us human — our social ties. “There’s this assumption that we can understand how the mind works by just looking at individual minds, […]
WASHINGTON — The tale of the first horseback riders may be written on the bones of the ancient Yamnaya people. Five excavated skeletons dated to about 3000 to 2500 B.C. show clear signs of physical stress that hint these Yamnaya individuals may have frequently ridden horses, researchers reported March 3 at the American Association for […]
SpaceX’s rapidly growing fleet of Starlink internet satellites now make up half of all active satellites in Earth orbit. On February 27, the aerospace company launched 21 new satellites to join its broadband internet Starlink fleet. That brought the total number of active Starlink satellites to 3,660, or about 50 percent of the nearly 7,300 […]
The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years. The insects — […]
A form of lightning with a knack for sparking wildfires may surge under climate change. An analysis of satellite data suggests “hot lightning” — strikes that channel electrical charge for an extended period — may be more likely to set landscapes ablaze than more ephemeral flashes, researchers report February 10 in Nature Communications. Each 1 […]
Fungi may help some tree-killer beetles turn a tree’s natural defense system against itself. The Eurasian spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) has massacred millions of conifers in forests across Europe. Now, research suggests that fungi associated with these bark beetles are key players in the insect’s hostile takeovers. These fungi warp the chemical defenses of […]
When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who garnered international praise for how she handled the pandemic in her country, recently announced her intention to resign, here’s how she summed up her surprise decision: “I know what the job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it […]