Italy: The Week of Italian Cuisine in the World kicks off in Beijing, Tianjin and Qingdao

The Week of Italian Cuisine in the World kicked off on Monday, with the aim to promote exquisite Italian cooking, the Mediterranean diet, Italian agri-food products and wine. In the 2023 edition, as in past years, the week will be further enhanced by activities organized by the Italian Embassy in China together with the Italian ... Read more

A new map exhibit documents evolving views of Earth’s interior

Much of what happens on the Earth’s surface is connected to activity far below. “Beneath Our Feet,” a temporary exhibit at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center in the Boston Public Library, explores the ways people have envisioned, explored and exploited what lies underground. “We’re trying to visualize those places that humans don’t naturally go ... Read more

A key virus fighter is implicated in pregnancy woes

An immune system mainstay in the fight against viruses may harm rather than help a pregnancy. In Zika-infected mice, this betrayal appears to contribute to fetal abnormalities linked to the virus, researchers report online January 5 in Science Immunology. And it could explain pregnancy complications that arise from infections with other pathogens and from autoimmune ... Read more

The great Pacific garbage patch may be 16 times as massive as we thought

We’re going to need a bigger trash can. A pooling of plastic waste floating in the ocean between California and Hawaii contains at least 79,000 tons of material spread over 1.6 million square kilometers, researchers report March 22 in Scientific Reports. That’s the equivalent to the mass of more than 6,500 school buses. Known as ... Read more

Hayabusa2 has blasted the surface of asteroid Ryugu to make a crater

Hayabusa2 has blasted the asteroid Ryugu with a projectile, probably adding a crater to the small world’s surface and stirring up dust that scientists hope to snag. The projectile, a two-kilogram copper cylinder, separated from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft at 9:56 p.m. EDT on April 4, JAXA, Japan’s space agency, reports. Hayabusa2 flew to the other ... Read more

A Greek skull may belong to the oldest human found outside of Africa

A skull found in a cliffside cave on Greece’s southern coast in 1978 represents the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside Africa, scientists say. That skull, from an individual who lived at least 210,000 years ago, was encased in rock that also held a Neandertal skull dating to at least 170,000 years ago, contends a team ... Read more

How meningitis-causing bacteria invade the brain

Bacteria can slip into the brain by commandeering cells in the brain’s protective layers, a new study finds. The results hint at how a deadly infection called bacterial meningitis takes hold. In mice infected with meningitis-causing bacteria, the microbes exploit previously unknown communication between pain-sensing nerve cells and immune cells to slip by the brain’s ... Read more

The Milky Way may be spawning many more stars than astronomers had thought

The Milky Way is churning out far more stars than previously thought, according to a new estimate of its star formation rate. Gamma rays from aluminum-26, a radioactive isotope that arises primarily from massive stars, reveal that the Milky Way converts four to eight solar masses of interstellar gas and dust into new stars each ... Read more

Psychedelics may improve mental health by getting inside nerve cells

Psychedelics go beneath the cell surface to unleash their potentially therapeutic effects. These drugs are showing promise in clinical trials as treatments for mental health disorders (SN: 12/3/21). Now, scientists might know why. These substances can get inside nerve cells in the cortex — the brain region important for consciousness — and tell the neurons ... Read more

Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone tool kits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say. Evidence of those food preparation activities pushes back hominids’ use of these tool kits, known as Oldowan implements, by roughly 300,000 years, say paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queen’s ... Read more