Art historians often wish that Renaissance painters could shell out secrets of the craft. Now, scientists may have cracked one using chemistry and physics. Around the turn of the 15th century in Italy, oil-based paints replaced egg-based tempera paints as the dominant medium. During this transition, artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli also ... Read more
In a book about his travels in Africa published in 1907, British explorer Arnold Henry Savage Landor recounted witnessing an impromptu meal that his companions relished but that he found unimaginably revolting. As he coasted down a river in the Congo Basin with several local hunter-gatherers, a dead rodent floated near their canoe. Its decomposing ... Read more
Beer lovers could be left with a sour taste, thanks to the latest in a series of studies mapping the effects of climate change on crops. Malted barley — a key ingredient in beer including IPAs, stouts and pilsners — is particularly sensitive to warmer temperatures and drought, both of which are likely to increase ... Read more
What do you get when you flip a fossilized “jellyfish” upside down? The answer, it turns out, might be an anemone. Fossil blobs once thought to be ancient jellyfish were actually a type of burrowing sea anemone, scientists propose March 8 in Papers in Palaeontology. From a certain angle, the fossils’ features include what appears ... Read more
Weird materials called Weyl metals might reveal the secrets of how Earth gets its magnetic field. The substances could generate a dynamo effect, the process by which a swirling, electrically conductive material creates a magnetic field, a team of scientists reports in the Oct. 26 Physical Review Letters. Dynamos are common in the universe, producing ... Read more
Neandertals are shaking off their reputation as head bangers. Our close evolutionary cousins experienced plenty of head injuries, but no more so than late Stone Age humans did, a study suggests. Rates of fractures and other bone damage in a large sample of Neandertal and ancient Homo sapiens skulls roughly match rates previously reported for ... Read more
Oceans may be shrinking — Science News, March 10, 1973 The oceans of the world may be gradually shrinking, leaking slowly away into the Earth’s mantle…. Although the oceans are constantly being slowly augmented by water carried up from Earth’s interior by volcanic activity … some process such as sea-floor spreading seems to be letting ... Read more
A new species of hulking ancient herbivore would have overshadowed its relatives. Fossils found in Poland belong to a new species that roamed during the Late Triassic, a period some 237 million to 201 million years ago, researchers report November 22 in Science. But unlike most of the enormous animals who lived during that time ... Read more
A new design for sun-powered desalination technology may lead to longer-lasting devices that produce cleaner water. The trick boils down to preventing a device’s components from touching the saltwater. Instead, a lid of light-absorbing material rests above a partially filled basin of water, absorbing sunlight and radiating that energy to the liquid below. That evaporates ... Read more
WASHINGTON — After a stunningly explosive summer, Kilauea, the world’s longest continuously erupting volcano, finally seems to have taken a break. But the scientists studying it haven’t. Reams of new data collected during an unprecedented opportunity to monitor an ongoing, accessible eruption are changing what’s known about how some volcanoes behave. “It was hugely significant,” ... Read more