A long course of antibiotics reduced the levels of a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease in the brains of mice, possibly by changing the species of bacteria in the gut. The results, described July 21 in Scientific Reports, suggest that gut bacteria may be linked in some way to Alzheimer’s. The finding is preliminary, cautions neurobiologist […]

Whiffs of ancient air trapped in rock salt for hundreds of millions of years are shaking up the history of oxygen and life on Earth. By carefully crushing rock salt, researchers have measured the chemical makeup of air pockets embedded inside the rock. This new technique reveals that oxygen made up 10.9 percent of Earth’s […]

Many homeowners go out of their way to make their yards friendly to birds. They plant vegetation or install feeders and birdhouses — and battle the squirrels that try to take advantage of that generosity. But what seems like a good deed for nature may be luring some birds to their deaths, a new study […]

CHICAGO — It’s a Higgs boson bonanza for particle physicists, who are capitalizing on the newest data from the Large Hadron Collider to delve more deeply into the particle’s properties. Scientists are keeping a keen eye out for any deviations from the standard model of particle physics, the overarching theory that describes elementary particles and […]

There’s a new equation floating around the world of physics these days that would make Einstein proud. It’s pretty easy to remember: ER=EPR. You might suspect that to make this equation work, P must be equal to 1. But the symbols in this equation stand not for numbers, but for names. E, you probably guessed, […]

After decades of research revealing their sophisticated lives, Neandertals still can’t shake their reputation as knuckle-dragging cavemen. And it’s the Old Man of La Chapelle’s fault. The Old Man of La Chapelle was the first relatively complete Neandertal skeleton ever found. Three French abbés discovered the bones in 1908. Soon after, geologist and paleontologist Marcellin […]

Few of the expletives discussed in cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen’s new book can be spelled out in this review. But Bergen argues, in a bluntly engaging way, that the largely secret science of swearing reveals much about who we are. Based on surveys of what people in several Western nations regard as unacceptable, the author […]

A spacecraft destined to bring samples of an asteroid back to Earth is scheduled to launch tonight. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will launch September 8 at 7:05 p.m. EDT atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force station in Florida. The probe will head for 101955 Bennu, a roughly 500-meter-wide asteroid whose 1.2-year orbit […]

A salty ocean more than 100 kilometers deep might lurk beneath Pluto’s icy heart, a new study suggests. The buried reservoir could have helped tip the dwarf planet over at some point in its past, bringing the heart-shaped region in line with gravitational forces from Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. A subsurface ocean isn’t a new […]

Man’s best friend can sometimes be wildlife’s worst enemy. Free-roaming dogs, both feral and owned animals that run loose, spread rabies and other diseases, kill wild animals and have caused extinctions. They’re even to blame for thousands of human deaths every year. And yet dogs get little of the hatred aimed at feral cats — […]