The number of marriage registrations in multiple cities across China increased year-on-year on Tuesday, the day of the traditional Qixi Festival, also known as Chinese Valentine's Day. It was the first Qixi since the country expanded an inter-provincial marriage registration pilot program to 21 provincial-level regions. Experts noted on Wednesday that the year-on-year rise in […]

Two tourists have been banned for life after entering the giant panda breeding base in southwest China and feeding a panda bamboo and peanuts. A 39-year-old man surnamed Han and a 51-year-old woman surnamed Liang entered the base's giant panda cub enclosure and fed a panda cub bamboo shoots and peanuts on Saturday afternoon, according […]

A set of physical exercises designed based on oracle bone inscriptions has been publicized to promote traditional Chinese culture and language by China's Ministry of Education.   The exercises were initiated by Anyang Normal University (ANU) in Central China's Henan Province and designed by its School of Music. Consisting of 19 characters of the oracle […]

There’s a deadly fungus spreading among snakes in the United States. But don’t cheer. As much as snakes might frighten us, they’re important players in the ecosystem, and we really don’t want to lose them. In 2006, scientists discovered some odd skin infections among snakes in declining populations in New Hampshire. Soon after, fungal infections […]

Call it a T. rex pregnancy test. Chemical analyses of fingernail-sized slivers of bone can reveal whether a Tyrannosaurus rex was expecting, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh and colleagues report March 15 in Scientific Reports. The analyses confirm that T. rex had medullary bone, a type of reproductive tissue found […]

The Zika virus may have hopped a ride on a 747 from Southeast Asia in 2013 to invade the Americas. Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, and his colleagues have retraced the virus’ steps in Brazil and pinpointed its introduction there to between May and December 2013. That coincides with a […]

When visiting the center of a galaxy nicknamed J0230, pack a sturdy windproof jacket. There, you will encounter a galactic hurricane with winds whipping at about 200 million kilometers per hour. At that speed, nearly 20 percent of the speed of light, a trip around Earth would take just 0.7 seconds. These are the fastest […]

Ant antennae don’t just receive chemical signals — they send them, too. Colonies of ants communicate through chemical cues produced all over their bodies. Studies have shown that ants use their antennae to identify their own nest-mates and potential invaders. But antennae also produce the key compounds that ants use to tell friend from foe, […]

Joni Mitchell was right: We are stardust. Another one of the essential ingredients for life as we know it might have formed in space and then rained down on a young Earth, researchers suggest in the April 8 Science. The simple sugar ribose — a crucial piece of the molecular machinery inside cells — can […]

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) use their internal clock and the sun to guide them 4,000 kilometers south on their annual fall migration from eastern North America to central Mexico. Scientists have struggled to determine how butterfly brains combine visual cues from the sun with molecular timekeeping in their antennae to make the epic journey. A […]