Mutated gene associated with colon cancer discovered in 18th-century Hungarian mummy

A new Tel Aviv University discovery suggests that a genetic predisposition to cancer preceded the advent of modernization -- and, in a bizarre twist, they discovered this evidence in an 18th-century Hungarian mummy.

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Living up a bum - The Sea Cucumber and Pearl Fish

They say 'Home is where the heart is', well for some 'Home is where the bum is'.. Wait! What? Backup! Yep you heard right 'Home is where the bum is', if you're a pearl fish and that bum is a sea cucumber.

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The Stunning Beauty of Braided Rivers

Most rivers flow in one broad channel of water, but some rivers split into lots of small channels that continually split and join each other to give a braided appearance. These are called braided rivers.

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Olm eggs: Tense Wait for Baby Slovenian 'Dragons'

In a Slovenian cave visited by a million tourists each year, a bizarre and rare amphibian is guarding a significant clutch of eggs.

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Frightful Nights Under the Stars

Nighttime skywatching sometimes means expecting the unexpected as these stories from amateur astronomers illustrate.

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History of science: When eugenics became law

Victoria Nourse reviews a study on a historic US misuse of biology, the case of Buck v. Bell. Adam Cohen's 'Imbeciles' relates a key chapter in this story. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.

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Maps of the Moon Mountains Once Thought to Be the Source of the Nile

The search for the source of the Nile captivated civilizations for centuries. For a long stretch of time from ancient Greece right up into the 19th century, the answer to that mysterious question was the Mountains of the Moon. This range of peaks wound up on a number of maps despite being entirely fictional.

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How our ancestors drilled rotten teeth

Long before humans invented writing, the wheel and civilisation, they learned how to drill rotten teeth to relieve the pain of tooth decay

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Gardening and the Secret of Happiness

Botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has written beautifully about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales, examines the revelations of the garden in "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants" — an unusual and richly rewarding book blending botany, Native American mythology, natural history, and philosophy.

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Rule #91: And the Birding Oscar Goes To...

It’s not just about the acting. Find out which film should win based on accurate bird depictions alone. To a birder, hearing or seeing an out-of-place bird is like seeing an SUV in a Civil War drama.

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Museum of Lost Objects: The Winged Bull of Nineveh

One year ago a man took a pneumatic drill to the statue of a winged bull at the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern Iraq. It's one of countless treasures destroyed by vandals, militants or military action in the region in the last 15 years. Kanishk Tharoor and Maryam Maruf tell the first of 10 stories about ancient objects that have now been lost.

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Six burning questions for climate science to answer post-Paris

The Paris agreement has given us some solid targets to aim for in terms of limiting global warming. But that in turn begs a whole range of new scientific questions.

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Tungurahua Volcano

The Tungurahua volcano spews fumes and lava in Huambalo, Ecuador, Feb. 27, 2016.

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MAP shows what continent REALLY thinks of EU

EUROPE is turning against Brussels with anti-EU feeling spreading through the Continent - as our exclusive map today reveals.

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Why This Canadian Province Is Slaughtering All Its Wolves

The government has commissioned the killing of well over 1,000 wolves in the past decade after destroying the land of its prey—the caribou. By James Wilt.

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Secretary Bird

Sagittarius serpentarius is found throughout Africa south of the Sahara, except the extreme deserts of the Namib coast and the forested region around the equator in western Africa.

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60 years after pioneering survey, Wisconsin prairies are changing rapidly

Researchers have found that human influence has accelerated the rate of species change in these prairies and likely in other natural places.

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Hand-Painted Maps of Area Codes, Housing Prices, and More That Make the Mundane Beautiful

Paula Scher is an award-winning New York City–based graphic designer whose decades of work include creating the Citibank logo and executing commissions for high-profile clients, including Microsoft, Bloomberg, the Museum of Modern Art, Tiffany & Co., the High Line, and the Metropolitan Opera. But for many years she has pursued a side passion: hand-painting vibrant, sprawling, unapologetically subjective maps of the world that offer a painterly twist on the visualization of data.

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Something strange has happened to reindeer 30 years after Chernobyl

Chilling photos of Norway's "radioactive reindeer."

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Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals

Humming their individual songs may be a way for gorillas to communicate dinner times and contentment with their meals. Audio recordings in article.

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How Ancient Coral Revealed the Changing Length of a Year

The lines on fossilized specimens show that millions of years ago, it took 420 days for the Earth to complete an orbit around the sun.

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Meet the man behind British bonsai: 'I let the trees tell me what they want'

At first glance, you could get the wrong idea about John Trott. With his long, streaked hair, he looks more rock ’n’ roll than rock garden. But although he appears to be a “horticultural headbanger”, he spends most of his life out of sight.

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Why You Can't Trust GPS in China

When you touch down within China's borders, your trusty smartphone GPS suddenly goes a little haywire. Here's why.

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China has created an artificial star 8,600 times hotter than the sun

The reaction, which is caused by nuclear fusion, has the potential to revolutionize how we use energy.

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Images of Change

Muir Glacier melt, Alaska

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Maybe It’s Time to Take Animal Feelings Seriously

Dogs can read human emotions. So, it appears, can horses. Whales have regional accents. Ravens have demonstrated that they might be able to guess at the thoughts of other ravens — something scientists call “theory of mind,” which has long been considered a uniquely human ability. All of these findings have been published within the past several weeks, and taken together they suggest that many of the traits and abilities we believe...

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Build a Bat House

One little brown bat can eat 60 medium-sized moths or over 1000 mosquito-sized insects in one night! How to attract mosquito eating bats, build and mount a bat house and garden for bats. Late winter is the best time to install a bat house.

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Lab-grown sperm makes healthy offspring

Sperm have been made in the laboratory and used to father healthy baby mice in a move that could lead to infertility treatments. By James Gallagher.

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Caught Sadie Sleeping

With all her winter hair she looks like a wookie. Time for a haircut.

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‘Selfish’ DNA flouts rules of inheritance

R2d2 is selfish DNA that could skew scientists’ views of adaptation and evolution. By Tina Hesman Saey.

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FORMS IN NATURE: Understanding Our Universe

Through scientific study and understanding, we deepen our connection to the natural world. An audiovisual collaboration by Kevin Dart // Stéphane Coëdel // David Kamp // Nelson Boles

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Undisturbed Places - A Timelapse Film

There are places in the world where stars are the only source of light. Their singularity is breathtaking, inclines to reflection and becomes the root of inspiration. Places like that are usually unspoiled, natural and intact. These are the places where humans live in symbiosis with nature.

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Fritz Clearing the Counter

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3-D printer helps tell why flies swarm to Dracula orchids

A team of University of Oregon scientists has unlocked the mystery of the mimicry used by Dracula orchids to attract flies and ensure their survival, using a 3-D printer to spoof the insects.

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Identification of animals and plants is an essential skill set

I have recently been made abundantly aware of the lack of field skills among biology students, even those who major in ecology. By field skills we mean the ability to identify plants and animals, to recognise invasive species and to observe the impact of processes such as fire on the landscape.

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360° Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur

David Attenborough meets the biggest animal ever to walk the Earth, in 360 - a Titanosaur.

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Watch the World's First Footage of Wild Wolverine Mother with Kits

Wildlife filmmaker Andrew Manske spent five winters in some of the harshest places in the world to capture this elusive creature on camera.

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The Newest, and Smallest, ‘Biggest’ Flower

Researchers from two universities in the Philippines reported the existence of Rafflesia consueloae — officially the smallest of the world’s “giant” flowers — Thursday in the journal PhytoKeys. At around 3.8 inches in diameter, it’s about the size of a softball.

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WTO swats down India’s massive solar initiative

The U.S. filed a complaint against India for requiring use of domestically produced panels, and the WTO took America’s side.

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Built to Peck: How Woodpeckers Avoid Brain Injury, Segment 1

MIT Professor Lorna Gibson introduces you to why she began studying how woodpeckers avoid brain injury when pecking, and what you'll learn in this series of videos.

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‘Orchidelirium’ Explodes With Color at New York Botanical Garden

This year’s orchid show at the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory offers a tropical tour that evokes the heady time of orchid fever in Victorian England.

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This Planetary Futurist Wants Us To Fundamentally Reimagine A Sustainable Future

Alex Steffen wrote the book on sustainability. Now he wants to show us that we have the capacity to solve global problems—if we are willing to work for it.

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The islands where dragons are real

Komodo dragons might not breathe fire or fly but they are still awe-inspiring animals – the race is on to save them from becoming mere legends

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Development: Slow down population growth

Within a decade, women everywhere should have access to quality contraceptive services, argues John Bongaarts.

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Why Do So Many Tornadoes Hit the United States?

America sees more than 1,000 twisters each year, far more than anywhere else on the planet. Why is that?

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Fear of predators makes raccoons flee from recorded barks

Now all you need to do is install a motion sensor barker on garbage cans!

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Quietly Growing Among Us, These Trees Flew to the Moon and Back

A tree near you may be secretly extraordinary. On the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, 500 seeds rode aboard the command module, orbiting the moon 34 times in the...

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Ocean acidification is already harming the Great Barrier Reef's growth

By artificially going 'back in time' to more alkaline ocean conditions, researchers have shown the damage that ocean acidification is already doing to the Great Barrier Reef.

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Molar teeth study could unlock human fossil record

Scientists now have a method to help them extrapolate tooth and jaw size in incomplete fossil finds.

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Secrets in the Ice

When we think of storing information today, we conjure up rows of giant computer servers that house endless streams of digital data. All the world’s information, it seems, will one day be preserved as ones and zeros in permanent, stable, and indestructible devices. So it may sound strange that ice, an ephemeral, unstable, and brittle substance, has been one of the world’s most permanent means of information storage. The cloud, in fact, has nothing on ice.

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