Tag Archives: Discovered

The human gut and the human brain share a hotline that scientists have been mapping for decades. Nutrients such as sugar and fat trigger signals that travel from the digestive tract to nerve centers in a flash, guiding everything from cravings to satiety. Yet the thought that the brain might also monitor the trillions of microbes living in the colon …

Just before the first COVID lockdown in March 2020, Carlos Neto de Carvalho and his wife, Yilu Zhang, were walking along Monte Clérigo beach in southern Portugal. As the geologist and geographer couple scrambled over rocky outcrops and an old collapsed cliff, they stumbled on a series of ancient Neanderthal footprints. “It was early in the morning of a sunny …

A bizarre reptile once scurried through the Triassic treetops with an extravagant crest on its back, one made from neither scale, nor bone, nor feather. The extinct creature’s 247-million-year-old fossils immediately stood out to paleontologists. The impressive appendage on its back looks like a frill of overlapping feathers at first glance, but it’s much older than the earliest fossilized feather, …

A Pennsylvania woman was diagnosed with deadly cancer after being dismissed by doctors. Rylie Toomey, 27, was in the midst of planning her wedding and training for a half marathon when she was struck with unbearable abdominal pain in October 2024. She rushed to the hospital, where doctors performed a CT scan and insisted she was just constipated before sending …

There really is something to the concept of having a gut feeling. New research out today suggests our bodies can directly sense and communicate with the many bacteria lining our digestive tract. Scientists at Duke University led the study, published Wednesday in Nature. They found that nerve cells can respond in real time to bacterial signals from the gut—including signals …

Astronomers have spotted a variety of weirdly blinking phenomena out there in the big wide Milky Way through history, but a newly discovered pulsating object truly appears to be one of a kind. Located several thousand light-years away, the object named CHIME J1634+44 is a rare case of a cosmic light that brightens and fades over inexplicably long timescales. A …

Sadness and depression can feel heavy enough to cause your shoulders to slump and even cause you to feel a faint flush on your face, as if someone turned up the temperature. Many people report the same thing: when the blues roll in, a gentle warmth tags along. Doctors have wondered for decades whether that extra body heat is simply …

Sometimes serendipity happens in science. Whether it’s an apple falling from a tree or a melting chocolate bar, some of the world’s greatest discoveries come from happy accidents, even if their stories may be apocryphal. According to a new paper on arXiv, there’s a new story to add to the archives of serendipitous scientific discoveries – Rubin happened to make …

An Australian lizard in the same genus as the komodo dragon has been found harboring secret bone chainmail under their scaly skin. Goannas – a name that encompasses several Australian species – are not the only monitor lizards with this fascinating adaptation, either. A wild new study has found tens of monitor lizard species sporting hidden osteoderms; tiny bones that …

Scientists have uncovered the oldest known fossilized animal sperm, found preserved in a 50-million-year-old cocoon from Antarctica. This unprecedented finding pushes back the timeline of such discoveries by a full 10 million years. A Remarkable Discovery in Antarctica The discovery was made by Dr. Benjamin Bomfleur from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and his research team. The sperm, which …