Archives: Science
Why the monkeypox outbreak is mostly affecting men who have sex with men
The virus did not spread well between people in the past but may have found a new niche in tightly connected sexual networks
Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
Unless Europe’s Large Hadron Collider coughs up a surprise, the field of particle physics may wheeze to its end
How the wild jungle fowl became the chicken
New studies propose surprisingly late date, and link to rice growing, for chicken domestication
What did the ancient Maya see in the stars? Their descendants team up with scientists to find out
The historic Maya oriented their lives by the heavens. Today, their descendants and Western scholars team up to understand their sophisticated astronomy
Early dogs may have doubled in size to protect livestock
Archaeological evidence suggests domestic canines bulked up between 8000 and 2000 years ago
Ancient Maya tooth sealant glued gemstones in place—and may have prevented tooth decay
Organic adhesives could have warded off infections
Climate change could expand forests. But will they cool the planet?
These are strange times for the Indigenous Nenets reindeer herders of northern Siberia. In their lands on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, bare tundra is thawing, bushes are sprouting, and willows that a generation ago struggled to reach knee height now grow 3 meters tall, hiding the reindeer. Surveys show the Nenets autonomous district, an area the size of Florida, now has four times as many trees as official inventories recorded in the 1980s.
Taught to the test
AI software clears high hurdles on IQ tests but still makes dumb mistakes. Can better benchmarks help?
A quantum sense for dark matter
By harnessing the strange rules of the subatomic realm, quantum sensors could solve one of the universe’s biggest mysteries