Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead
Fragments of the skull (left) and shoulder blades (right) of a woman buried at Loch Borralie, UK Rebecca Ellis-Haken A woman interred in Scotland 2000
Are we getting to the point where it’s safe to gene-edit babies?
Light micrograph of a human egg cell after fertilisation CC STUDIO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY When a rogue researcher in China revealed in 2018 that he had
The looming El Niño could be bad – but much worse is to come
Waves supercharged by El Niño hit the California coast in 2016 Eliason/Zuma Wire/Shutterstock A “Godzilla El Niño” is coming, according to some newspaper headlines. The
Climate Fiction prize winner Helen Phillips: ‘The book is in the future, but everything is seeded from our present’
Hum is set in an over-heated near-future metropolis Ingram Publishing / Alamy Hum by Helen Phillips, the story of a mother’s struggle to protect and
Mathematical AI helps researchers crack 50-year-old problem
Paul Erdős made many conjectures about numbers in his life Oliver Helbig/Getty Images Just a week after an AI disproved an 80-year-old conjecture and astonished
Mars astronauts may do laundry by blasting clothes with a plasma beam
White shirt material being cleaned with cold plasma University of Alabama in Huntsville, Propulsion Research Center Astronauts in space can’t do laundry – but that
Mercury may have gained all of its unexpected water in a single day
We may now know how Mercury gained its ice deposits NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Around 100 million years ago, the surface of Mercury suddenly underwent
We may finally know why dinosaurs like T. rex evolved tiny arms
Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t the only predatory dinosaur with small arms ROGER HARRIS/Getty Images/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY With jaws like these, who needs big arms? A new
Will burying dead trees after a wildfire keep their carbon locked up?
Charred trees still standing after a wildfire in Glacier National Park, Montana Gorski/NurPhoto/Shutterstock In 2021, a smouldering underground coal seam ignited the tinder-dry grass and
Neanderthals treated a dental cavity by drilling into the tooth
Three views of the Neanderthal tooth with evidence of dental treatment Hexian Culture, Tourism and Sports Bureau, Ma’anshan A 59,000-year-old Neanderthal tooth found in a