WASHINGTON — When traces of H5N1 bird flu showed up in cow’s milk last year, it raised fears that the virus could become more infectious to humans. So far, that hasn’t happened, virologist Richard Webby reported April 23 at the World Vaccine Congress Washington. Cows were surprise hosts for the virus. Influenza viruses latch on…
Warren Loeppky has been a pediatric dentist in the Canadian city of Calgary for 20 years. Over the last decade, he says, tooth decay in children he’s seen has become more common, more aggressive and more severe. Many of his young patients have so much damage that he has to work with them under general…
Millions of years ago in Nebraska, chunky, stumpy-legged rhinoceroses were party animals, crowding together in huge herds at watering holes and rivers. Chemical signatures in the fossilized teeth of the extinct, corgi-shaped beasts suggest they didn’t roam widely, instead forming big, local herds unlike the more solitary rhinos of today, researchers report April 4 in…
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…