Why did Sherlock Holmes employ a bloodhound to sniff out clues, and not a pug? It all boils down to behavior and training—and not any intrinsic scent-detection skills—according to a preprint study posted this month on bioRxiv, which found no evidence that some domestic dog breeds have better senses of smell than others . Sherlock might look beyond the kennel for...

NEW YORK CITY— Humans eat more than 30,000 species of plants and animals. But for the most part we don’t know much about what is in them. Researchers have thoroughly analyzed the molecular components of only a few hundred of the most common foods, leaving a vast gap in our knowledge of nutrition. This week, food scientists and activists met here to launch a new...

A single dose of an experimental antibody drug protects children from malaria for up to 6 months, according to a clinical study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine . The therapy, an injectable monoclonal antibody called L9LS that has already shown success in adults , reduced infections and clinical disease in 6- to 10-year-olds in...

Scientists have discovered dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a molecule thought to have only living sources, on a cold, lifeless comet. The finding calls into question the molecule’s usefulness as a biosignature and the significance of an earlier hint of it in the atmosphere of an alien planet. “This is the first sign of an abiotic source,” says Nora Hänni, a chemist at the...

By now, the tendency for chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to occasionally make stuff up, or “hallucinate,” has been well documented. Chatbots have generated medical misinformation , invented fake legal cases , and fabricated citations . Now, a new study has found that AI models are not only seeing things, but...

Ask an older person where painful arthritis strikes and most will point to their joints—knees, hips, and fingers. That’s because as people age, those joints lose the cartilage and viscous fluid, known as synovial fluid, that keeps them supple. Sharks and skates have no bones—and no arthritis—but they apparently have the same kind of joints we do. Once thought to exist only in...

The U.S. government announced new measures yesterday to slow the spread of the H5N1 influenza virus among cattle, following the revelation that milk sold commercially in 10 states contained fragments of the virus. An order issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) restricts the movement of dairy cattle between states and mandates the reporting of infected cows. The...

The 240 species of cichlid fish in Africa’s Lake Tanganyika come in an astonishing variety of shapes and sizes, from the paper clip–size “sheller” that lives in abandoned snail shells to the nearly meter-long emperor cichlid. Biologists have long wondered what drove this burst of evolutionary creativity. Now, researchers have demonstrated what many suspected but had not been...

CONSERVATION Interior Department boosts restoration The largest manager of public lands in the United States last week announced it will manage them to promote ecological stewardship, while continuing to allow extractive commercial uses such as mining, oil drilling, and cattle grazing. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees nearly 1...

If you think it’s hard to chat next to a busy highway, try raising a nestling there. A new experiment on developing birds shows traffic noise can slow their growth and lead to lifelong impairments. The finding raises new concerns about the effect of noise pollution on wildlife—and humans as well. “I’m surprised by these effects,” says Clinton Francis, an ecologist at...

The health risks of social isolation and loneliness are inspiring government action and a hunt for effective interventions

Diamonds, the hardest material, may have gotten easier to make. Researchers today report a new way to grow synthetic diamonds without the crushing pressures normally required. Although the approach yields crystals no bigger than 100 nanometers across—about the size of a typical virus—researchers suspect it may eventually yield larger crystals and the extended diamond films that are...

About 150 million years ago, life on Earth began a complete revamp, thanks to the rapid rise of one giant group: the flowering plants, or angiosperms. The more efficient photosynthesis of magnolias, waterlilies, as well as many early  lineages now extinct pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, and their nectar and fruits provided new types of food for insects and other animals, fueling new,...

There’s a giant hole on the backside of the Moon. The South Pole–Aitken (SPA) Basin, the Moon’s largest and oldest impact crater, is more than 2500 kilometers wide and 8 kilometers deep—nearly big enough to swallow two Indias and hide the Himalayas. Now, China plans to land in it. The basin may have been blasted out during a barrage of asteroids that pummeled Earth and...

In 568 C.E., according to contemporary records, warlike horse riders from the Mongolian steppes called the Avars surged into the grassy plains flanking the Danube River, in roughly the territory of modern Hungary. Together with other groups from Central Asia, they formed a new power center in Europe, forcing the Byzantine Empire to pay tribute. But they left no written history. Now,...

When a shaggy bamboo coral ( Isidella tentaculum ) gets jostled by the arm of a remotely operated submersible, its limbs begin to sparkle with bluish light. The gleam penetrates the blackness of the deep sea, where many octocorals—an ancient, diverse group of marine invertebrates that includes quill-shaped sea pens, bamboo corals, and other soft corals and waving sea...

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced pay increases today for early-career scientists who are recipients of its Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSAs), after an NIH advisory group recommended raises in December 2023 . Postdocs will now be paid at least $61,008, an increase of $4500 over their current minimum salary level—though still...

New U.K. immigration rules will deter international scientific talent and harm universities, science policy experts say. This month, a rise in the minimum salary that international skilled workers must meet to obtain a visa took effect, coming on top of a sharp hike in the fee migrants must pay to access health care, as well as new restrictions on visas for family members. The...

VIENNA— Samples of eerie blue glacial ice from Antarctica are a staggering 6 million years old, scientists announced last week, doubling the previous record for Earth’s oldest ice. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected. Bubbles in the ice trap...

In early March, veterinarian Barb Peterson noticed the dairy cows she cared for on a Texas farm looked sick and produced less milk, and that it was off-color and thick. Birds and cats on the farm were dying, too. Peterson contacted Kay Russo at Novonesis, a company that helps farms keep their animals healthy and productive. “I said, you know, I may sound like a crazy, tinfoil...

On a sunny day 7 years ago in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda, researchers were startled to observe chimpanzees scoop dry bat feces from under a hollow tree and devour it. In 60 years of observations at Budongo, no one had ever seen such a thing, recalls veterinary epidemiologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin—Madison. “Aside from the ick factor, we all had the...

Astronomers suspect an unusual near-Earth rocky object is not a typical escapee from the Solar System’s asteroid belt, but is instead a chunk of the Moon blasted into space eons ago by a spectacular impact. Now, a team of researchers has modeled what sort of lunar impact could have ejected such a gobbet of Moon and deposit it in a stable, nearby orbit. Surprisingly, only one strong...

Researchers and public health officials in Africa are intensifying their battle against mpox, a neglected infectious disease that long has circulated on the continent and suddenly gained notoriety in 2022 when it started to spread rapidly in Europe and North America. At a meeting last week in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, scientists from there and nine other affected African countries...

For research funders seeking to minimize bias in their selection process, removing applicants’ institutional affiliations from their submissions could help address a common disparity: disproportionate funding going to those at the most prestigious places. That’s the finding from researchers at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, who reported last month in eLife...