Javier Luque’s first thought while looking at the 100-million-year-old piece of amber wasn’t whether the crustacean trapped inside could help fill a crucial gap in crab evolution. He just kind of wondered how the heck it got stuck in the now-fossilized tree resin? “In a way, it’s like finding a fish in amber,” said Luque, a […]

Between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago, a time known as the Archean eon, Earth’s weather could often be described as cloudy with a chance of asteroid. Back then, it was not uncommon for asteroids or comets to hit Earth. In fact, the largest ones, more than six miles wide, altered the chemistry of the […]

Grafting arrays of molecular pumps onto metal–organic framework (MOF) surfaces has allowed scientists to devise a completely new form of adsorption that they’ve called ‘mechanisorption’. ‘It’s a new phenomenon by which molecules are actively transported to a surface compartment and retained in a non-equilibrium steady state before being released to the bulk in a non-destructive […]

Most elements lighter than iron are forged in the cores of stars. A star’s white-hot center fuels the fusion of protons, squeezing them together to build progressively heavier elements. But beyond iron, scientists have puzzled over what could give rise to gold, platinum, and the rest of the universe’s heavy elements, whose formation requires more […]

With season’s endyou topple to the ground,aching, broken limbsheld aloft by briny handsthat bare you proudlyto their sunken home. Drifting. With hushed reverenceyou plunge into the laminate,embraced in placeby cold and surging tides. Drifting. You sail through crystal watersand mother-of-pearl skies,skimming ragged currentsacross this frozen,breaking kingdom. Drifting. Washed up on frigid shores,your weathered bodyshimmers in […]

Forgetting a child in the car is a parent’s worst nightmare, but some experts say our ability to remember even the most crucial tasks can be hijacked by something as simple as a missing cue. According to Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter, tragic cases of forgotten children started to rise near the turn of the millennium, […]

In a new paper, scientists suggest that efforts to understand human cognition should expand beyond the study of individual brains. They call on neuroscientists to incorporate evidence from social science disciplines to better understand how people think. “Accumulating evidence indicates that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other higher-level functions take place across people,” the researchers wrote […]

Cambridge researchers have developed ‘mini brains’ that allow them to study a fatal and untreatable neurological disorder causing paralysis and dementia – and for the first time have been able to grow these for almost a year. A common form of motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often overlaps with frontotemporal dementia (ALS/FTD) and can […]

More than 90 years ago, physicist Eugene Wigner predicted that at low densities and cold temperatures, electrons that usually zip through materials would freeze into place, forming an electron ice, or what has been dubbed a Wigner crystal. While physicists have obtained indirect evidence that Wigner crystals exist, no one has been able to snap a […]

Scientists have known for a long time that magnetism is created by the spins of electrons lining up in certain ways. But about a decade ago, they discovered another astonishing layer of complexity in magnetic materials: Under the right conditions, these spins can form skyrmions, little vortexes or whirlpools that act like particles and move around […]