Smithsonian
Over a third of strawberries harvested are discarded due to their short shelf life. Here’s how CRISPR could help them last longer
More than a third of all fresh strawberries that consumers buy end up getting tossed out because they're bruised, moldy ...
American bumblebee has declined in numbers by more than 90% in 8 states across the northern US
American bumblebees are a vital pollinator for wildflowers and crops, and their decline could have severe consequences for the environment ...
Who needs a COVID vaccine booster shot, and when?
On August 12, the FDA announced that third doses of Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines would be made available for patients ...
Climate warming could increase land available to grow crops — but also boost the spread of plant diseases
The agricultural impact of climate change would be a little more straightforward, if it occurred in a world where crops ...
A human protein genetically engineered into wheat plants increases yields by 50%. Is this dramatic tweak replicable?
It’s not enough to grow more food—humanity needs to grow more efficiently. With an eye toward feeding the world’s growing ...
‘A tyrannical clawhold’ on their world: How Tyrannosaurus Rex dominated the prehistoric ecosystem
The sheer size and apparent ferocity of T. rex has been apparent from the outset, but, paleontologists have learned, this ...
‘If cats and dogs made up their own country, they would rank fifth in meat consumption.’ Cell-based meat poised to cut pet food industry’s carbon footprint
If cats and dogs made up their own country, they would rank fifth in terms of meat consumption, according to ...
‘Hello World!’ Bacterial DNA combines CRISPR and electricity to store data. Here’s what that means
A study published on January 11 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology details how the researchers led by Columbia University ...
Why grandmothers might be a driving force behind human evolution
[Kristen] Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, has extensively studied the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers ...
10 top dinosaur discoveries of 2020
As we anticipate what the fossil record might reveal in 2021, here’s a look back at ten dinosaur discoveries that ...
2020’s most important human evolution discoveries
Since many scientific articles are years in the making, a lot of exciting discoveries were still revealed in 2020! … ...
Plants are evolving to look like their surroundings to protect themselves from scavenging humans
Fritillaria delavayi grows on the rocky alpine slopes of China’s Hengduan Mountains, and for more than 2,000 years its dried ...
‘A million years of memory and history, biology and psychology’: The science behind what makes the dog-human bond so unique
In a minute or two, Winston will choose. And in that moment will be a million years of memory and ...
Scientists reconstructed fox-sized dinosaur ‘pea brain’
According to [a] new study, Buriolestes schultzi’s brain had an elongated shape and weighed about 1.5 grams, as much as a ...
How extreme environmental changes spurred early human evolution
[A]fter hundreds of thousands of years of stability, dramatic shifts occurred [in the East African Rift Valley] beginning about 400,000 ...
Recreating the Neanderthal Y chromosome helps explain how modern humans emerged
One hurdle in deciphering human prehistory is the absence of evidence of a Neanderthal Y chromosome in the genetic record ...
Colorants used in tattoos could play a role in detecting cancer
Currently, only three dyes with fluorescent properties used as optical imaging contrast agents—methylene blue, indocyanine green and fluorescein—are approved for ...
‘Everything smells like a more disgusting version of Spaghetti O’s’: Recovered COVID patients report awful phantom smells
Instead of a scentless world, an increasing number of people who lost their sense of smell because of Covid-19 are ...
After prehistoric asteroid destroyed most life on Earth, why were birds able to survive?
With hindsight, birds can be categorized as avian dinosaurs and all the other sorts—from Stegosaurus to Brontosaurus—are non-avian dinosaurs. The ...
What’s happening to viruses, bacteria and mites that exist in our socially-isolated home islands?
We may feel isolated now, in our homes, or apart in parks, or behind plexiglass shields in stores. But we are ...
‘From pipsqueaks to titans’: The complicated evolution of dinosaurs
For tens of millions of years, even as other dinosaur species grew to huge sizes, 40-foot carnivores weren't around. How, ...
7 things we learned about human evolution in the past decade, including that we are older than we thought
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Smithsonian’s “David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,” here are some of the ...
How a 19th-century typhus outbreak helped doctors fight the coronavirus and other pandemics
It was a truism among 19th-century physicians that, in the words of German epidemiologist August Hirsch, “[t]he history of typhus ...
These 2 ‘crucial and very different’ tests could help us contain the coronavirus
Amidst a slew of shortages and logistical hurdles, American researchers are now slowly rolling out two crucial and very different ...
If you survive the coronavirus, do you gain immunity? And for how long?
Scientists don’t yet have definitive answers about SARS-CoV-2 immunity. For now, people who have had the disease appear unlikely to ...
Searching for signs of Earth’s earliest life more than ‘a needle-in-the-haystack’ problem
The search for signs of Earth’s earliest forms of life isn’t quite like looking for dinosaur bones protruding out from ...
Strange cave-fellows? Unexpected discovery suggests 3 early human species lived together in South Africa
Two million years ago, three different early humans—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the earliest-known Homo erectus—appear to have lived at the same time in ...
