New study explores what let some flying dinos survive what was almost the end of their world Nothing against trees. But maybe it’s better not to get too dependent on them if you want to survive a big flaming space object crashing into Earth. The asteroid impact that caused a mass extinction 66 million years […]

A search for plasma precipitation in the sun’s atmosphere reveals that the rain turns up in unexpected places. That discovery might mean the rain can fall as a fine mist as well as a shower, new data suggest. Ultimately, tracing the movement of this plasma could help solve the mystery of why the solar atmosphere, or […]

Medical science is making huge leaps lately and sometimes some new therapies may look counterintuitive for laymen. For example, did you know that cooling down person‘s head after head injury may be a good idea? Scientists from The University of Edinburgh used a 3D simulation to show how brain cooling is beneficial when treating conditions […]

Emergency teams responding to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo began on May 21 inoculating those most at risk of contracting the virus: health workers and people who have come into contact with Ebola victims. It’s the first real-world test for an experimental vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV. In field trials in Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2015, this vaccine […]

An asteroid that flouts the norms of the solar system might not be from around here. The renegade asteroid travels around the sun in reverse — in the opposite direction of the planets and most other asteroids (SN: 5/13/17, p. 5). Now two scientists suggest that’s because the space rock originated from outside the solar system, according to […]

The first reported case in a big city has health officials worried. Ebola has reemerged. The virus has killed at least 25 people since early April in an ongoing outbreak in Congo.  And on May 18, the World Health Organization declared a “high” public health risk in Congo, as well as a “high risk” of the […]

Exactly how long a neutron lives is currently under debate. Now researchers suggest this mystery could be solved if neutrons sometimes decay into particles of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up more than four-fifths of all matter in the universe. A flurry of research is now putting this notion to the test. […]

Limiting global warming this century to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures would be a boon to the planet’s biodiversity. This lower warming threshold, compared with warming of 2 degrees C, will preserve much larger swaths of the geographic ranges of tens of thousands of land-based species of plants, vertebrates and insects living on the planet, […]

People who moved out of southern China cultivated big changes across ancient Southeast Asia, a new analysis of ancient human DNA finds. Chinese rice and millet farmers spread south into a region stretching from Vietnam to Myanmar. There, they mated with local hunter-gatherers in two main pulses, first around 4,000 years ago, and again two […]

An international team of astronomers used ALMA to observe a distant galaxy called MACS1149-JD1. They detected a very faint glow emitted by ionised oxygen in the galaxy. As this infrared light travelled across space, the expansion of the Universe stretched it to wavelengths more than ten times longer by the time it reached Earth and […]