Science

When their two-year-old son Biel started falling over a lot and had difficulty climbing stairs after learning to walk, Jaume Puig and his wife sought medical help to figure out the problem.

After visiting several doctors, the toddler was diagnosed with low vision, a condition far more common than blindness that makes daily tasks a challenge.

Exactly 300 years ago, in 1721, Benjamin Franklin and his fellow American colonists faced a deadly smallpox outbreak. Their varying responses constitute an eerily prescient object lesson for today's world, similarly devastated by a virus and divided over vaccination three centuries later.

As a microbiologist and a Franklin scholar, we see some parallels between then and now that could help governments, journalists and the rest of us cope with the coronavirus pandemic and future threats.

An evacuation order was issued for the small Canadian village of Lytton, which sits between mountains just northeast of Vancouver.

Wednesday, it set the record for the hottest place in Canada, hitting an all-time record for U.S.'s neighbor to the north. As of Wednesday evening, however, things got even worse. A wildfire has turned deadly as it begins to ravage the town.

Astronomy is only possible as a field of study because the universe is so predictable. Just as plants and animals can be categorized into easily-identifiable species and families, stellar objects, too, appear with stark regularity — evoking the same visual patterns as a fern or a tree branch might.

Yet unlike some fields, astronomers also typify death — namely, the death of stars, which produce very specific types of massive explosions depending on the stars' properties. The aftermath of these explosions, known as supernovae, are so readily classifiable that they are called "standard candles," meaning observations of their brightness can be used to calculate distance.

The authors of a new book about former President Donald Trump's handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic are spilling additional details about Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's role in mismanaging the public health crisis.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Washington Post reporters Damian Paletta and Yasmine Abutaleb explain how one of Kushner's big initiatives at the start of the pandemic actually backfired and slowed down the national response to the deadly disease that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans.

Fox News hosts Pete Hegseth and Rachel Campos-Duffy lashed out in anger over the weekend about a Planned Parenthood flyer that informs students of their options for using birth control.

"Teaching sex ed, trying to divide kids from parents and the values," Hegseth said. "Dividing kids from the values of their household."

An international group of archaeologists have discovered a missing piece in the story of human evolution.

Excavations at the Israeli site of Nesher Ramla have recovered a skull that may represent a late-surviving example of a distinct Homo population, which lived in and around modern-day Israel from about 420,000 to 120,000 years ago.

As researchers Israel Hershkovitz, Yossi Zaidner and colleagues detail in two companion studies published today in Science, this archaic human community traded both their culture and genes with nearby Homo sapiens groups for many thousands of years.

The new fossils

Pieces of a skull, including a right parietal (towards the back/side of the skull) and an almost complete mandible (jaw) were dated to 140,000–120,000 years old, with analysis finding the person it belonged to wasn't fully H. sapiens.

Nor were they Neanderthal, however, which was the only other type of human thought to have been living in the region at the time.

Instead, this individual falls right smack in the middle: a unique population of Homo never before recognised by science.

Through detailed comparison with many other fossil human skulls, the researchers found the parietal bone featured “archaic" traits that are substantially different from both early and recent H. sapiens. In addition, the bone is considerably thicker than those found in both Neanderthals and most early H. sapiens.

The jaw too displays archaic features, but also includes forms commonly seen in Neanderthals.

The bones together reveal a unique combination of archaic and Neanderthal features, distinct from both early H. sapiens and later Neanderthals.

Are there are more of these people?

The authors suggest fossils found at other Israeli sites, including the famous Lady of Tabun, might also be part of this new human population, in contrast to their previous Neanderthal or H. sapiens identification.

The “Lady of Tabun" (known to archaeologists as Tabun C1) was discovered in 1932 by pioneering archaeologist Yusra and her field director, Dorothy Garrod.

Extensively studied, this important specimen taught us much about Neanderthal anatomy and behaviour in a time when very little was known about our enigmatic evolutionary cousins.

Dinosaur species large and small made the Arctic their year-round home and probably developed wintering strategies like hibernation or growing insulating feathers, according to a new study.

The paper, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, is the result of more than a decade's worth of painstaking fossil excavations, and puts to rest the notion that the ancient reptiles lived only in hotter climes.

Bones found in an Israeli quarry are from a branch of the human evolutionary tree and are 120,000 to 140,000 years old, scientists reported Thursday.

A team of anthropologists spent years analyzing the fragments of a skull, lower jaw bone and tooth that were uncovered in Nesher Ramla in 2010, comparing them to hundreds of fossils around the world from different eras.

Beekeepers this year in the United States reported the second highest annual loss of managed honey bee colonies since records began in 2006, according to results of a nationwide survey released Wednesday.

The non-profit Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) said in its preliminary analysis that beekeepers—ranging from small backyard keepers to commercial operations—lost 45.5% of their colonies between April 2020 and April 2021. The results are based on a survey of over 3,300 U.S. beekeepers managing a combined 192,384 colonies.

Much of the brittle, upper crust of Venus is broken into fragments that jostle and move – and the slow churning of Venus' mantle beneath the surface might be responsible. My colleagues and I arrived at this finding using decades-old radar data to explore how the surface of Venus interacts with the interior of the planet. We describe it in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 21, 2021.

Planetary scientists like me have long known that Venus has a plethora of tectonic landforms. Some of these formations are long, thin belts where the crust has been pushed together to form ridges or pulled apart to form troughs and grooves. In many of these belts there's evidence that pieces of the crust have moved side to side, too.

Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) posted a Twitter thread asserting that people who have survived a covid-19 infection were unlikely to be reinfected and have better immunity against variants than those who have been vaccinated against — but not infected by — SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid.

The social media communication represented his latest salvo in the ongoing debate over whether natural immunity is equivalent or even better than vaccination.

In a column for the Daily Beast, conservative Matt Lewis -- who admits he opposes abortion -- warned fellow conservatives and Republicans alike that, should the Supreme Court strike down the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, it could have a long-range and devastating impact on the GOP's political future.

Lewis, who had previously applauded the appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court, claims it is likely some or part of Roe could be dismantled and warned conservatives to prepare for the blowback.