Science

[:es]In the spring of 2012, while digging a hole for a thermal pool, construction workers in Grosseto, Italy, hit scientific pay dirt: layers of stratified soil and rock filled with prehistoric bones and artifacts close to 171,000 years old. Excavating the pool would have to wait. With further digging, the researchers found tantalizing evidence of…

[:es]Sometime this summer, a spacecraft orbiting over the moon’s far side, out of contact with controllers on Earth, will release a lander. The craft will ease to a soft landing just after lunar sunrise on an ancient, table-flat plain about 600 kilometers from the south pole. There, it will unleash a rover into territory never…

[:es]If you’re afraid of giant insects, climate change has a silver lining for you. A new study shows that as temperatures have increased over the past century, the world’s biggest beetles may have been shrinking, some downsizing by as much as 20% in 45 years.[:]

[:es]The modern world would barely be recognizable to the mammoth and bison herds of ages past. Roads subdivide large stretches of land, and clusters of buildings and people have sprung up nearly everywhere. Indeed, humans have modified the environment so much, they may have cut the distance by which mammals—large and small—roam by some two-thirds,…

[:es]ENIGMA, the world’s largest brain mapping project, was “born out of frustration.”[:]

[:es]After years of studying maps, Mormon scripture, and Spanish chronicles, Ferguson had concluded that the Book of Mormon took place around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico. He had come to the jungles of Campeche, northeast of the isthmus, to find proof.[:]

[:es]The most famous prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, is often described as the Nobel Prize for math. Now, confidential correspondence from the 1950s provides a first window into the deliberations of early Fields Medal committees. The letters suggest the award was never intended to honor the most important discoveries in the field, but was…

[:es]For more than a decade, Colin Dundas, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, has had a daily routine: inspecting a dozen or so high-resolution images beamed back every day from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). A few years ago, something surprising popped out from the planet’s sea of rust: a pale…

[:es]For the first time, scientists have produced evidence in living humans that the protein tau, which mars the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, spreads from neuron to neuron. Although such movement wasn’t directly observed, the finding may illuminate how neurodegeneration occurs in the devastating illness, and it could provide new ideas for stemming the brain damage…