Science

Science

[:es]Minimuscles let amputees control a robot hand with their minds[:]

Building a beautiful robotic hand is one thing. Getting it to do your bidding is another. For all the hand-shaped prostheses designed to bend each intricate joint on cue, there’s still the problem of how to send that cue from the wearer’s brain.
Science

[:es]Was this life’s first meal?[:]

Studies of the origin of life are replete with paradoxes. Take this doozy: Every known organism on Earth uses a suite of proteins—and the DNA that helps build it—to construct the building blocks of our cells. But those very building blocks are also needed to make DNA and proteins.
Science

[:es]New sense discovered in dog noses: The ability to detect heat[:]

Dogs’ noses just got a bit more amazing. Not only are they up to 100 million times more sensitive than ours, they can sense weak thermal radiation—the body heat of mammalian prey, a new study reveals. The find helps explain how canines with impaired sight, hearing, or smell can still hunt successfully.
Science

[:es]The coronavirus seems unstoppable. What should the world do now?[:]

The global march of COVID-19 is beginning to look unstoppable. In just the past week, a countrywide outbreak surfaced in Iran, spawning additional cases in Iraq, Oman, and Bahrain. Italy put 10 towns in the north on lockdown after the virus rapidly spread there. An Italian physician carried the virus to the Spanish island of…
Science

[:es]Scientists say they’ve cracked the mystery of why whales migrate—and it’s all about healthy skin[:]

Some people travel across oceans to seek warm, healing waters in spas or coastal resorts. It turns out that whales are likely making their annual migrations for much the same reason: to maintain healthy skin, according to a new study out today.
Science

[:es]From ‘living’ cement to medicine-delivering biofilms, biologists remake the material world[:]

The bricks in Wil Srubar’s lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, aren’t just alive, they’re reproducing. They are churned out by bacteria that convert sand, nutrients, and other feedstocks into a form of biocement, much the way corals synthesize reefs. Split one brick, and in a matter of hours you will have two.
Science

[:es]Is an Aboriginal tale of an ancient volcano the oldest story ever told?[:]

Long ago, four giant beings arrived in southeast Australia. Three strode out to other parts of the continent, but one crouched in place. His body transformed into a volcano called Budj Bim, and his teeth became the lava the volcano spat out.
Science

[:es]Scientists are racing to model the next moves of a coronavirus that’s still hard to predict[:]

Beyond China itself, Thailand is the country that most likely will have people who arrive at one of its airports with an infection by the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that has sickened more than 30,000 people. So says the latest update of a global risk assessment model created by a team of researchers from the Humboldt…
Science

[:es]Is this the original board game of death?[:]

Ancient Egyptians took their board games seriously. The backgammonlike senet started out as a mere pastime, but over nearly 2 millennia it evolved into a game with deep links to the afterlife, played on a board that represented the underworld. Now, a version of the game sitting in a California museum might reveal when this…