Despite capturing hearts around the world, the wild axolotl — an aquatic salamander with feathery frills and a soft smile — faces extinction. Fortunately, for both axolotls and their fans, a new conservation method shows promise. In captivity, axolotls abound as household pets and research subjects. But wild axolotls, endemic to a single lake in…
Members of New Mexico’s Picuris Pueblo Tribal Nation have long told stories about having descended from ancient North American ancestors. Genetic evidence now backs up what Picuris people — but not archaeologists — knew all along and fleshes out lost pieces of the tribe’s past. The new results, published April 30 in Nature, came out…
Athletic, crocodile-like reptiles with bladed teeth made their last stand in the Caribbean as recently as 4.5 million years ago. New fossils unearthed in the Dominican Republic suggest the reptile group went extinct millions of years later than previously thought, researchers report April 30 in Proceedings B of the Royal Society. The findings also help…
Floating displays you can reach into and manipulate, like the ones Tony Stark uses to design his super suits in the Iron Man movies, are one step closer to reality. A new device renders 3-D graphics that users can grab, drag and rotate. Such interactive visuals — which can be seen without a VR headset…
A new way of generating clean power could run your lights with rain. Hydropower typically relies on the movement of water to create electricity through mechanical energy, such as spinning turbines in a dam. But a new method, described April 16 in ACS Central Science, skips the mechanics and harnesses tiny bursts of energy sparked…
How will the LA fires affect the ocean? These researchers are racing to find out