For centuries, mathematicians and floor designers alike have been fascinated by the shapes that can tile a plane — in particular, those that do so without repetition. Now, a team of chemists has described a molecule that naturally assembles into these irregular patterns, laying the groundwork for engineering materials that behave differently from regular solids. “When…
Ancient human relatives crafted sharp-edged tools out of animal bones around 1.5 million years ago, researchers say. Discoveries at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, a famous East African fossil location, represent the oldest known evidence of systematic bone tool production by hominids, according to archaeologist Ignacio de la Torre of CSIC-Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and…
The black hole at the Milky Way’s heart neither slumbers nor sleeps. Instead, the ring of plasma surrounding it flickers constantly, punctuated by superbright flares, observations show. Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe Sgr A* and its disk for hours at a time over the course of a year, from April 2023…
Hawaii’s male crickets can’t hide from their buzzing boogeymen for long. In just a handful of years, cricket-killing parasitic flies have evolved hearing that’s more sensitive to their prey’s new, covert love songs, researchers report February 20 in Current Biology. The nocturnal fly Ormia ochracea lays its eggs on crickets, which hatch into larvae that…
In January in Monterrey, Mexico, Iván Venzor was one of only a dozen people in the world to glimpse a potential Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of a distant star. It happened too fast to see by eye — just a seconds-long flicker of light — but Venzor’s backyard telescope recorded the data, allowing him…
These scientists have a plan to demystify the vaginal microbiome