We humans spend a third of our lives asleep, oblivious to our surroundings and temporarily paralyzed. It’s a vulnerability that would seem to diminish our odds of survival, so evolutionarily speaking it must also somehow confer tremendous benefits. Yet our best guesses about what those benefits are tend to come …
Oct. 14 (UPI) — In lakes all over the world, algal blooms are getting more severe. In a new global survey of large, freshwater lakes — the first of its kind — scientists found algal blooms have become more frequent and intense over the last 30 years. Algal blooms can negatively …
As the latest controversy over new research illustrates, nutrition science can be open to interpretation. Researchers are in another fight about food. This week the Annals of Internal Medicine published studies arguing that eating red meat poses minimal health risks for most people, and that even our certainty about that link is …
“We know that habitat fragmentation and loss is the number one driver of species extinctions in the U.S. and across the globe,” said Ellen Damschen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sept. 27 (UPI) — Efforts to restore and reconnect isolated patches of pine savanna in South Carolina is paying …
CHICAGO (AP) — The largest study of its kind found new evidence that genes contribute to same-sex sexual behavior, but it echoes research that says there are no specific genes that make people gay. The genome-wide research on DNA from nearly half a million U.S. and U.K. adults identified five …
A fossil from Ethiopia is letting scientists look back millions of years in our evolutionary history — and they see a face peering back. The find, from 3.8 million years ago, reveals the face for a presumed ancestor of the species famously represented by Lucy, the celebrated Ethiopian partial skeletonfound in 1974. …
NAPLES — In one of the quietest parts of a national library, down narrow hallways and through keyhole doorways, a nondescript set of cabinets holds one of the oldest written collections in Western civilization. There is one problem: The scrolls are illegible. They look a lot like incinerated firewood. They were …
It’s a record breaking distance for OSIRIS-REx NASA’s asteroid-sampling spacecraft OSIRIS-REx just snapped its closest picture yet of Bennu, the deep-space rock it’s been hovering around since the end of last year. The high-resolution image highlights the object’s very rocky surface and even showcases a very large boulder on its southern half. …
Hundreds of papyri scrolls unearthed at the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have remained unopened since they were burnt, blackened and buried by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Their ancient texts have been wound tightly inside, unread ever since. Now some of their secrets could be …
June 5 (UPI) — Siberia has been inhabited by humans for some 40,000 years, and new genomic analysis made possible by the recovery of ancient baby teeth is shedding light on the ancient humans who lived there. For the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed DNA …
In a study of mice, researchers found no links between the neural systems related to reward and monitoring water intake. After a long hike on a hot day, few things are more rewarding than a tall, frosty glass of water. The rush of pleasure that comes with a drink might …
May 31 (UPI) — To better understand the decline of Neanderthals, researchers in France developed a population model and used simulations to determine which demographic factors had the largest effect on Neanderthal numbers. Their analysis, published this week in the journal PLOS One, showed declining fertility offers the likeliest explanation for the …
