This bizarre ancient critter has been kicked out of a group that includes humans

No ifs, ands or butts about it: A teeny roughly 530-million-year-old critter that lacks an anus is not, as previously thought, the oldest member of a wide-ranging animal group that…

The Tonga eruption may have spawned a tsunami as tall as the Statue of Liberty

The massive Tonga eruption generated a set of planet-circling tsunamis that may have started out as a single mound of water roughly the height of the Statue of Liberty. What’s…

COVID-19 gave new urgency to the science of restoring smell

It was the juice that tipped him off. At lunch, Ícaro de A.T. Pires found the flavor of his grape juice muted, flattened into just water with sugar. There was…

‘The Five-Million-Year Odyssey’ reveals how migration shaped humankind

The Five-Million-Year OdysseyPeter BellwoodPrinceton Univ., $29.95 Archaeologist Peter Bellwood’s academic odyssey wended from England to teaching posts halfway around the world, first in New Zealand and then in Australia. For…

The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…

How death’s-head hawkmoths manage to fly straight for miles in the dark

Sitting alone in the cockpit of a small biplane, Martin Wikelski listens for the pings of a machine by his side. The sonic beacons help the ecologist stalk death’s-head hawkmoths…

A new seasoning smells like meat thanks to sugar — and mealworms

A spoonful of sugar may help the mealworms go down. Adding sugars to powdered, cooked mealworms creates a seasoning with an appetizing “meatlike” odor, researchers report August 24 at the…

A new seasoning smells like meat thanks to sugar — and mealworms

A spoonful of sugar may help the mealworms go down. Adding sugars to powdered, cooked mealworms creates a seasoning with an appetizing “meatlike” odor, researchers report August 24 at the…

7-million-year-old limb fossils may be from the earliest known hominid

In 2001, researchers unearthed a partial fossil leg bone and two forearm bones in the central African nation of Chad. Those fossils come from the earliest known hominid, which lived…

50 years ago, genes eluded electron microscopes

Visualizing Genes: The Possible Dream – Science News, September 2, 1972 Molecular biologists can now visualize the larger structures of the cell, such as the nucleus and chromosomes, under the powerful…