The discovery is among the strongest evidence in the fossil record that the insects pollinated prehistoric cycads, a plant that preceded flowering plants.

A potential treatment for sudden liver failure could cut the need for transplants, say scientists at the University of Edinburgh. The liver has an incredible natural ability to repair itself, but this can be lost in some injuries including severe drug overdoses. The therapy is a cancer drug that restores this regenerative potential.

Recent reports that smoking heroin (and an associated risk of brain damage) is increasing among young people aren't looking at the full picture.

Though still in preliminary stages, scientists welcome 'big step forward' in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas levels and curtail climate change.

New observations of the hottest known planet have revealed temperatures similar to those typically seen at the surface of a star, as well as an atmosphere of vaporised iron and titanium. The findings add to the diverse and, in some cases, extreme conditions seen on planets far beyond our own solar system. Kevin Heng, a professor at the University of Bern, and co-author of the latest work, said: “The temperatures are so insane that even though it is a planet it has the atmosphere of a star.”

Mars is kind of a bummer: That place is a hotbed of dynamic dust storms that got so big in recent months that they encircled the entire planet. Those conditions, sure to be a challenge for future Mars colonies, are a buzzkill for NASA’s Opportunity Rover right now: A dust storm forced the droid, which has been roaming Mars for 14 years, to shut down in June, and it’s still turned off today.

During a research cruise to the Sargasso Sea in fall 1971 marine biologist Ed Carpenter first noticed peculiar, white specks floating amidst the mats of brown sargassum seaweed. After some investigating he discovered they were tiny bits of plastic. He was stunned. If thousands of the broken down particles were showing up in in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 550 miles from any mainland, he says, “I figured it’s all over the place.”

Less than 5 percent of elephants die from cancer, and researchers may have finally figured out why. According to a study from The University of Chicago, elephants produce "zombie genes" that can help protect the animal from cancer. Here's how it works: Humans and other animals carry one copy of a "master tumor suppressor" gene. Elephants have 20 copies. Scientists found that gene can trigger a "zombie gene" to come back to life with a new purpose: killing cells in damaged DNA.

A Harvard scientist thinks he's reached a new milestone: a genetic test that helps identify people who are at high risk of having a heart attack. Can he convince doctors to use it? "I think--in a few years, I think everybody will know this number, similar to the way we know our cholesterol right now," muses Sekar Kathiresan, director of the Cardiovascular Disease Initiative at the Broad institute and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

A Nasa spacecraft is rocketing towards the sun on a quest to get closer to our star than anything ever sent before. The Parker solar probe will fly straight through the wispy edges of the corona, or outer solar atmosphere, which was visible during last August’s total solar eclipse. It eventually will get within 3.8m miles (6.1m km) of the sun’s surface, staying comfortably cool despite the extreme heat and radiation, allowing scientists to explore the sun in a way never before possible.

New research reignites a row with scientists who want to reduce salt intake to near zero

Such an instrument could allow researchers to look for extraterrestrial microbial life directly.

A team of astronomers led by George Becker at the University of California, Riverside, has made a surprising discovery: 12.5 billion years ago, the most opaque place in the universe contained relatively little matter. It has long been known that the universe is filled with a web-like network of dark matter and gas. This “cosmic web” accounts for most of the matter in the universe, whereas galaxies like our own Milky Way make up only a small fraction.

Blue light from digital devices and the sun transforms vital molecules in the eye's retina into cell killers, according to optical chemistry research at The University of Toledo.

Barbra Streisand is not alone. At a South Korean laboratory, a once-disgraced doctor is replicating hundreds of deceased pets for the rich and famous. It’s made for more than a few questions of bioethics.

Gerta keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.” Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

Mating may last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours

Only when flowering is Pilostyles visible externally, the flowers erupting from the stems of its host like a weird botanical Alien.

Researchers provide more evidence for their landmark claim that gene editing rid embryos of a disease mutation — but scientists are still arguing over the results.

If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you’re in very good company.

Leading scientists warn that passing such a point would make efforts to reduce emissions increasingly futile

Ultra-hot Jupiters are a new class of exoplanets that astronomers are increasingly finding scattered throughout the cosmos. These incredibly hot gas giants sit much closer to their host stars than Mercury does to the Sun, which invariably leads to tidal locking — meaning the same side of the planet always faces the star. This causes dayside temperatures to exceed 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 Celsius), while nightside temperatures hover around 1,800 F (1,000 C). Furthermore, ultra-hot Jupiters display unique atmospheric characteristics that are not seen in other types of planets, such as an apparent lack of most molecules.

Forty years ago, scientists theorized a new kind of low-mass particle that could solve one of the enduring mysteries of nature: what dark matter is made of. Now a new chapter in the search for that particle has begun. This week, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) unveiled a new result, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, that places it in a category of one: it is the world’s first and only experiment to have achieved the necessary sensitivity...

What are supervolcanoes, and how catastrophic can they be? Learn how supervolcanoes form, where supervolcanoes are located, and how their destructive capabilities can make way for new life.

It may have been a lazy, 'why bother?' attitude that led to the downfall of an early species of human, according to new research. Findings from the Australian National University after an archaeological excavation in Saudi Arabia found Homo erectus tended to do the bare minimum to get by, while other species of human were inclined to put in the effort. They used "least-effort strategies" for tool making and collection of resources, as opposed to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, who would climb mountains and haul materials over dozens of kilometres to ensure they had quality goods, the research showed.

Researchers wanted to know why certain infections were increasing in hospitals. They were surprised by what they found.

Despite two lost legal battles in the US, domain name seizures, and millions of dollars in damage claims, Sci-Hub continues to offer unauthorized access to academic papers. The site's founder says that she would rather operate legally, but copyright gets in the way. Sci-Hub is not the problem she argues, it's a solution, something many academics appear to agree with.

After nearly 20 years, the record of the most distant radio galaxy ever discovered has been broken. A team led by Ph.D. student Aayush Saxena (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) has found a radio galaxy from a time when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at a distance of 12 billion light-years.

How did British medical worker Janet Parker become the world's last victim of smallpox? By Monica Rimmer.

The rate of recurrent adenomas was not changed by dietary intervention. Our results are compatible with, at most, an absolute reduction related to the intervention of about 4 percent in the incidence of recurrent adenomas (Table 4). We also found no effect of the dietary intervention on the incidence of large or advanced recurrent lesions.

The problem with string theory, according to some physicists, is that it makes too many universes. It predicts not one but some 10500 versions of spacetime, each with their own laws of physics. But with so many universes on the table, how can the theory explain why ours has the features it does?

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov's animal experiments.

No. On top of all the other bad things we can attribute to plastics pollution (the damage to marine life, the leaching of toxic chemicals into the environment, the making gross and unsightly of beaches, etc.) a team at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s Center for Microbial Oceanography has found one more: Plastics are releasing potent greenhouse gases, including methane and ethylene, into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. (Is there any of the kind of rate?)

Researchers explore a loophole that extracts useful energy from a fluid’s seemingly random motion. The secret? Sugar and asymmetry.

The month of July 2018 was a scary one for people who care about the planet that we're leaving our children. "All-time hottest temperature records set all over the world this week," reads a July 6 headline in the U.K.'s Evening Standard. Nearly a month later, the situation hadn't changed. "Temperatures near or pass all-time records in Europe as another heat wave blasts the continent," reads a July 27 headline in the Washington Post. From July 20 in New York magazine: "A Global Heat Wave Has Set the Arctic Circle on Fire".