A weathered sign in the Minnesota River Valley proudly proclaims: “World’s Oldest Rock.” Erected in 1975, it marks a 3.8-billion-year-old gneiss — or so scientists thought. Turns out, it’s not the world’s oldest rock (Since 2019, that title has been held by an estimated 4-billion-year-old Canadian Acasta Gneiss). An analysis of minerals in the Minnesota…
This caterpillar wears the body parts of insect prey
After 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope is still churning out hits. In just the last year or so, scientists have used the school bus–sized observatory to confirm the first lone black hole, reveal new space rocks created by a NASA asteroid-impact mission and pinpoint the origin of a particularly intense, mysterious burst of radio…
As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone. Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in…
The rapid pace of change under the current presidential administration has been amping up people’s feelings of uncertainty. That collective unease can take a toll on societal well-being, researchers say. “Given that unfamiliarity permeates our current ether … uncertainty can be considered a widespread public health problem,” Emily Hauenstein argued earlier this year in…
Warming temperatures may cause methane emissions from wetlands to rise — by helping methane-producing bacteria thrive. Higher temperatures favor the activity of wetland soil microbes that produce the potent greenhouse gas, at the expense of other microbes that can consume it, researchers report April 23 in Science Advances. The scientists, led by microbiologist Jaehyun Lee…