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, […]

Knotlike structures called skyrmions might help scientists untangle the inner workings of atomic nuclei, a new study suggests. A skyrmion is a tiny disturbance in a substance, a swirling pattern that, like a knot, is difficult to undo. In the 1960s, nuclear physicist Tony Skyrme suggested that these structures — since named after him — […]

DENVER — A superheated blast from the skies obliterated cities and farming settlements north of the Dead Sea around 3,700 years ago, preliminary findings suggest. Radiocarbon dating and unearthed minerals that instantly crystallized at high temperatures indicate that a massive airburst caused by a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere instantaneously destroyed civilization in a […]

Some signs of water on Mars may have just dried up. Thanks to the way data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are handled, the spacecraft may be seeing signs of hydrated salts that aren’t really there, planetary scientists report online November 9 in Geophysical Research Letters. That lack of salts could mean that certain sites […]

Nearly 200 species of Great Barrier Reef corals have found a second home in the deep ocean. That’s six times as many species as previously thought to be living in the dark, cold waters off northeastern Australia, researchers report December 12 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Perhaps more important than the number of […]

A nearly complete hominid skeleton known as Little Foot has finally been largely freed from the stony shell in which it was discovered in a South African cave more than 20 years ago. And in the first formal analyses of the fossils, researchers say the 3.67-million-year-old Little Foot belonged to its own species. In four […]

I love to hate the phrase “sleep like a baby.” It’s a beautiful example of a saying that’s based on the exact opposite of what it’s intended to convey. Babies (many of them, anyway) are rotten sleepers. During my last pregnancy, I wondered if I might luck out with a good sleeper. Or at least […]

When radiochemist Jennifer Shusterman and her colleagues got the first results of their experiment, no one expected what they saw: Atoms of a weird version of the element zirconium had enthusiastically absorbed neutrons. “People were quite surprised and we had lots of discussions,” says Shusterman, of Hunter College of the City University of New York. […]

Beer today, gone tomorrowRising temperatures and more frequent droughts could cut barley crop yields worldwide by the end of the century, leading to beer shortages and high prices, Jennifer Leman reported in “Add beer to the list of foods threatened by climate change” (SN: 11/10/18, p. 5). Online reader Jean Beaulieu was hopeful that scientists […]