Tag Archives: Scientists

A group of rabbits in Colorado with grotesque, hornlike growths may seem straight out of a low-budget horror film, but scientists say there is no reason to be spooked – the furry creatures merely have a relatively common virus. The cottontails recently spotted in Fort Collins are infected with the mostly harmless Shope papillomavirus, which causes wart-like growths that protrude …

A group of rabbits in Colorado with grotesque, hornlike growths may seem straight out of a low-budget horror film, but scientists say there’s no reason to be spooked — the furry creatures merely have a relatively common virus. The cottontails recently spotted in Fort Collins are infected with the mostly harmless Shope papillomavirus, which causes wart-like growths that protrude from …

For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze Age, however, the plague …

A new scientific analysis finds that people with prediabetes who take vitamin D have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Previous research has found a similar link. Endocrinologists and dietitians explain the link. More than one in three American adults has prediabetes, a condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to be …

Published last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of Chilean scientists announced the discovery of Yeutherium pressor, a mouse-sized mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs roughly 74 million years ago. Found in the remote Rio de las Chinas Valley in the Magallanes region of southern Chile, the fossil offers an unusually complete glimpse into the diversity …

A sunflower sea star – credit, Ed Bierman CC 2.0. For years, a wasting disease has been turning sea stars to goo off the California coast. Scientists now finally know the cause, and are beginning to fight back. Whether it has over 20 arms like the sunflower sea star, or just 5, billions of Pacific sea stars were being wiped …

Scientists may have identified a way to naturally regulate blood sugar levels and sugar cravings in a similar fashion to drugs like Ozempic. In mice and humans, the key to unlocking this natural process was found to be a gut microbe and its metabolites – the compounds it produces during digestion. By increasing the abundance of this one gut microbe …

The Sabu Disk, unearthed from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian official Sabu in the Saqqara necropolis during the First Dynasty (circa 3100-2900 BC), has intrigued archaeologists and researchers for nearly a century. Its shape and purpose remain a topic of heated debate, with some suggesting that it served as a ceremonial object, while others propose that it may have …

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: We have not been able to detect dark matter yet, even though there are many aspects of the universe that suggest the existence of invisible matter. In one new theory, it is possible that dark matter exists in a mirror universe where there are only dark versions of forces that hold …

Some of the oldest air ever studied by scientists was trapped inside rock over 800 million years ago. Cracking the rock open and allowing the air to escape, the team who found it got a pretty astonishing surprise about the ancient atmosphere of Earth. When studying the Earth’s atmosphere in the ancient past, scientists have had to rely on indirect …