Tanklike armored dinosaurs probably pummeled each other — not just predators — with huge, bony knobs attached to the ends of their tails. Thanks to new fossil findings, researchers are getting a clearer understanding of how these rugged plant eaters may have used their wicked weaponry. Many dinosaurs known as ankylosaurids sported a heavy, potentially ... Read more
Books about the pandemic. Books about the ancient past. Books about outer space. These were a few of Science News staff’s favorite reads. If your favorite didn’t make this year’s cut, let us know what we missed at feedback@sciencenews.org. Vagina ObscuraRachel E. GrossW.W. Norton & Co.$30 For centuries, scientists (mostly males) have ignored female biology, ... Read more
A parasite might be driving some wolves to lead or go solo. Wolves in Yellowstone National Park infected with Toxoplasma gondii make more daring decisions than their uninfected counterparts, researchers report November 24 in Communications Biology. The wolves’ enhanced risk-taking means they are more likely to leave their pack, or become leaders of their own. ... Read more
As we head into our third pandemic winter, most people are all too familiar with the signs of COVID-19. The disease wears many different faces and can show up as chills, cough, difficulty breathing or other troublesome jumbles of symptoms. But sometimes, this illness can look positively peculiar. On rare occasions, SARS-CoV-2 rears its head ... Read more
If you saw Carlos Argüelles-Delgado’s childhood bedroom — the whiteboard for working out problems, the math textbooks they asked for as birthday gifts — you’d likely not be surprised that this kid would grow up to push the boundaries of modern physics. For years, physicists have known that the most successful theory to describe what ... Read more
Visitors to the village of Drumnadrochit, on the western shore of Scotland’s murky Loch Ness, come to see the nearby ruins of Urquhart Castle or to chance a glimpse of the elusive Loch Ness Monster. But growing up in Drumnadrochit, planetary scientist Robin Wordsworth says it was the unobscured view of the cosmos that seized ... Read more
Belinda Hankins first grappled with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. She had a fever, chills and trouble breathing, but the real clincher was her loss of smell. Hankins remembers opening a canister of Tony Chachere’s creole seasoning, lowering her nose to take a whiff, and not smelling a thing. “That stuff usually clears the ... Read more
Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern England. The rock blazed in a dazzling, eight-second-long streak of light, split into fragments and sped toward the Earth. The largest piece went splat in the driveway of Rob and ... Read more
Radiation-tolerant microbes might be able to live beneath Mars’ surface for hundreds of millions of years and may yet persist today, thanks in part — counterintuitively — to the Red Planet’s frigid, arid conditions. In addition to being cold and dry, the Martian surface is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, charged particles and other radiation ... Read more
In early 2022, malaria cases in the Ethiopian city of Dire Dawa surged, with more than 2,400 people sickened. The spike in infections was the work of an invasive mosquito species that’s spreading across Africa, scientists report. The finding, presented November 1 in Seattle at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine ... Read more