Author Archives: agnieszka

Do you think of Neanderthals as lumbering, slow, and clumsy? Think again, at least in regard to their hands. According to a report in the March 27 Nature, Neanderthals were as manually dextrous as modern humans. Neanderthals were previously thought … Continue reading →

In January 2002, a star named V838 Monocerotis suddenly became 600,000 times brighter than the sun, briefly becoming the brightest star in the Milky Way. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured the explosion in all its glory, showing the reverberation … Continue reading →

Male armpit sweat seems to be a mood-altering substance for women, according to researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Not only does it make women more relaxed and happy, but it also … Continue reading →

With the fear of terrorists using dirty bombs increasing, screening for smuggled nuclear materials has become more important than ever. Physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have invented a device that uses cosmic rays to detect … Continue reading →

Famed for their temples, their astronomy, and their human sacrifices, the Mayan civilization’s sudden collapse has always been mysterious. In the eighth century, the Mayan empire, which lasted more than a thousand years, stretched from Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula to Honduras, … Continue reading →

Most people find it depressing to contemplate the ultimate fate of the universe. Will it recollapse in a Big Crunch, or expand forever, becoming cold and dark? Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and his colleagues have come … Continue reading →

Footprints more than 300,000 years old have been found along the side of an inactive volcano in southern Italy. Though footprints more than 3 million years old have been discovered in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, they are thought to have been … Continue reading →

Using genetic engineering, British researchers have converted one species of yeast into another. Stephen Oliver of the University of Manchester and his colleagues reported in the March 6 Nature that swapping chunks of genetic material can create different species. Oliver … Continue reading →

A highly sensitive imaging instrument aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed a massive, doughnut-shaped cloud of gas around Jupiter. The designers of the instrument — physicists from Johns Hopkins University — reported in the Feb. 27 Nature that the 60,000-ton, … Continue reading →

Black cats are luckier than previously thought — lucky for themselves, anyway. An unusually colored animal would seem to be much more likely to go extinct unless the genes responsible for the color provided some additional benefit to help it … Continue reading →