Category Archives: news briefs

Perhaps you’ve heard of astroporn, those gorgeous, glowing images of planets and galaxies and pillars of gas found on Web sites like Astronomy Picture of the Day (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html). But what if you’re looking for something, say, a bit more intimate? … Continue reading →

Mungo Man, Australia’s oldest known human remains, is 20,000 years younger than previously thought, according to James Bowler of the University of Melbourne and colleagues in the Feb. 20 Nature. Mungo Man was discovered at Lake Mungo in New South … Continue reading →

It was long thought that healthy lions posed relatively little threat to people: Only sick or injured animals, unable to catch and kill their usual fast-moving prey, would attack slower humans. For example, the famous man-eating lions of Tsavo that … Continue reading →

Plants such as kudzu and animals such as zebra mussels, which can be harmless in their country of origin, can be a pest elsewhere, playing havoc with local wildlife and having huge economic costs. Two studies in the Feb. 6 … Continue reading →

Both of Mars’s polar ice caps consist mostly of frozen water, report Shane Byrne and Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology in last week’s Science. It was long thought that the southern ice cap was made almost entirely … Continue reading →

Imagine kissing someone – not a peck on the cheek, but full lip-to-lip contact. How do you tilt your head? Chances are, it’ll be to the right. Researchers have known for a long time that embryos and infants show a … Continue reading →

A computer program has decided that women are better than men at baby talk. Designed by Gerald McRoberts of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Malcolm Slaney of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, the program listens to speech and analyzes … Continue reading →

Sperm cells act like heat-seeking missiles when it comes to locating an unfertilized egg, according to a paper published in the February Nature Medicine. The egg tends to lie in a spot around 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the place … Continue reading →

As if it’s not scary enough that sharks can smell a drop of blood in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, or that they can sense the electric field given off by a hidden prey’s heartbeat; it seems they can also detect … Continue reading →

Six thousand years ago, neolithic Brits might have enjoyed sips of milk with their steaming haunches of meat. Researchers from England’s University of Bristol report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered milk-fat residue … Continue reading →