A natural history museum isn’t just a place to take visiting relatives or for entertaining kids on the weekends. These museums’ collections also play a vital, but under-celebrated, role in scientific research. That’s why, when Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro caught fire on September 2, more than just a catalog of natural and […]

In movies and TV shows, Tyrannosaurus rex often sports a fleet of big, sharp teeth that are almost always on display. But the dinosaurs and their kin may have kept their pearly whites mostly tucked behind lizardlike lips. Similar to Komodo dragons today, these dinosaurs had ample soft tissue around the mouth that would have […]

Indigenous knowledge and Western science have written a new tale about when horses most recently arrived in North America. Spaniards brought horses to Mexico in 1519. Indigenous peoples then took the reins, rapidly transporting offspring of those equine newcomers north along trade routes. As a result, a new study finds, many Native American populations across […]

Waves of cerebrospinal fluid which normally wash over brains during sleep can be made to pulse in the brains of people who are wide awake, a new study finds. The clear fluid may flush out harmful waste, such as the sticky proteins that accumulate in Alzheimer’s disease (SN: 7/15/18). So being able to control the […]

The only cure to being drunk is to wait it out. But that might not always be the case: Injecting drunk mice with a naturally occurring hormone helped them sober up more quickly than they otherwise would have, a new study shows. Mice that received a shot of FGF21 — a hormone made by the […]

Astrophysicist Erika Nesvold once asked an executive of a company aiming to mine the moon how he planned to address risks that mining equipment might carry microbes from Earth and contaminate the moon (SN: 1/10/18). His response: “We’ll worry about that later.” That’s a reckless mind-set when it comes to preparing for people to live […]

Timing is everything. Even how many calories a person burns while at rest depends on the hour. People burn about 129 more calories when resting in the afternoon and evening than in the early morning. But morning is better for burning carbohydrates, while fats are more likely to be burned in the evening, researchers report […]

Cholesterol-lowering drugs may one day gain a sidekick in the battle against heart disease. Taking a potent drug derived from fish oil along with a statin lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke in some high-risk people, researchers report. A clinical trial called REDUCE-IT tested the approach in more than 8,000 participants who either […]

China is about to make space history. In December, the country will launch the first spacecraft ever to land on the farside of the moon. Another craft, slated for takeoff in 2019, will be the first to bring lunar rocks back to Earth since 1976. These two missions — the latest in China’s lunar exploration […]

Whether people prefer coffee or tea may boil down to a matter of taste genetics. People with a version of a gene that increases sensitivity to the bitter flavor of caffeine tend to be coffee drinkers, researchers report online November 15 in Scientific Reports. Tea drinkers tended to be less sensitive to caffeine’s bitter taste, […]