A new, sustainable disinfectant made from sawdust and water can knock out more than 99 percent of some disease-causing microbes, including anthrax and several strains of flu. Widespread use of…
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This fabric can hear your heartbeat
Someday our clothing may eavesdrop on the soundtrack of our lives, capturing the noises around and inside us. A new fiber acts as a microphone — picking up speech, rustling…
Drug-resistant bacteria evolved on hedgehogs long before the use of antibiotics
Beneath the prickly spines of European hedgehogs, a microbial standoff may have bred a dangerous drug-resistant pathogen long before the era of antibiotic use in humans. It’s no question that…
A bacteria-virus arms race could lead to a new way to treat shigellosis
When some bacteria manage to escape being killed by a virus, the microbes end up hamstringing themselves. And that could be useful in the fight to treat infections. The bacterium…
Gut bacteria let vulture bees eat rotting flesh without getting sick
Mention foraging bees and most people will picture insects flitting from flower to flower in search of nectar. But in the jungles of Central and South America, “vulture bees” have…
Are viruses alive, not alive or something in between? And why does it matter?
Villain. Killer. Menace. Since 2020, scientists and public officials have used these words to describe SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. News articles, research papers and tweets repeatedly personify the…
3.42-billion-year-old fossil threads may be the oldest known archaea microbes
Threadlike filaments pressed in rock may be the remnants of archaea that burped methane near hydrothermal vents 3.42 billion years ago. If so, these strands in rock excavated in South…
‘The Dawn of Everything’ rewrites 40,000 years of human history
The Dawn of EverythingDavid Graeber and David WengrowFarrar, Straus and Giroux, $35 Concerns abound about what’s gone wrong in modern societies. Many scholars explain growing gaps between the haves and…
The earliest evidence of tobacco use dates to over 12,000 years ago
Ancient North Americans started using tobacco around 12,500 to 12,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 years before the oldest indications that they smoked the plant in pipes, a new study finds.…
‘Ghost tracks’ suggest people came to the Americas earlier than once thought
Footprints left behind by prehistoric people may be some of the strongest evidence yet that humans arrived in the Americas earlier than previously thought. Over 60 “ghost tracks” —…
