With no nipples and reptilelike eggs, short-beaked echidnas look like a first draft of a mammal. Yet, as Australia’s other digging mammals decline from invasive predators, the well-defended echidna is getting new love as an ecosystem engineer. The only mammals today that lay eggs are the four echidna species and the duck-billed platypus. Eggs are […]

SAN ANTONIO — Ancient Mesopotamians have traditionally been credited with inventing glassmaking around 3,600 years ago. But Mesopotamians may have created second-rate knock-offs of glass objects from Egypt, where this complex craft actually originated, researchers reported November 19 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Arguments that glass production originated in […]

New wastewater disposal regulations in Oklahoma will be enough to steady the state’s shaky ground, new research predicts. The injection of wastewater from oil and gas operations into underground wells has caused Oklahoma’s seismic activity to skyrocket (SN: 8/9/14, p. 13). In response, state regulators earlier this year ordered a 40 percent reduction in the […]

The spookiness of quantum mechanics has gone cosmic. Physicists have used starlight to perform a “Bell test” to verify the strange nature of quantum mechanics. For decades, such tests have repeatedly confirmed quantum physics’s quirks, but the tests contained loopholes. While the major loopholes have already been closed (SN: 12/26/15, p. 24), a lingering caveat […]

Rashes are the temporary tattoos of childhood. The prickly, red bumps can blossom across the skin for a host of reasons: an ear infection, a virus or even an allergic reaction to a penicillin antibiotic. What’s hard to tell, though, is whether the penicillin or the illness itself triggers the rash. To be safe, doctors […]

For pregnant women infected with Zika virus in the first trimester, the future is foreboding. Nearly 11 percent of U.S. women likely exposed to Zika in the early weeks of or just before pregnancy had babies or fetuses with birth defects, researchers report online December 13 in JAMA. The new study offers the first results […]

Humans are really good at picking out faces. Our brains are so good at this that we even see faces in places they don’t exist — like Jesus on toast. Flip a face upside down, though, and the brain needs an extra moment to determine that, yes, that’s a face. This is known as the […]

These findings would have rocked the scientific world, if only the evidence had been more convincing. New Planet 9 cluesA giant planet lurking at the outskirts of the solar system could explain the odd orbits of far-flung hunks of icy debris (SN: 2/20/16, p. 6). If the planet exists, its average distance from the sun […]

Tenth moon of Saturn The first natural satellite in the solar system to be discovered since artificial satellites were launched has been found circling Saturn. Dr. Audouin Dollfus of the Observatory of Physical Astronomy at Meudon, France, spotted Saturn’s tenth satellite on three photographs taken in mid-December when the planet’s rings were seen edge-on from […]

Zoom in on a soap bubble just before it bursts and brilliant, complex patterns emerge. Shimmery rainbows appear in thicker portions of the soap film, while clusters of dark spots appear in the thinnest regions. The thickness of the soap film determines the color seen. Light rays that reflect off of the top and bottom […]