All Stories by Helen Thompson
- Animals
Watch how a western banded gecko takes down a scorpion
New high-speed video reveals how normally mild-mannered geckos can violently shake venomous prey into submission.
- Space
Explainer: Calculating a star’s age
Scientists can figure out a star's mass or composition pretty easily. Determining how old that star is, however, is a lot harder.
- Animals
Giant worms may have hidden beneath the ancient seafloor to ambush prey
Twenty-million-year-old tunnels unearthed in Taiwan may have been home to creatures similar to today’s monstrous bobbit worms.
- Archaeology
See what these animal mummies are keeping under wraps
A new method of 3-D scanning mummified animals reveals life and death details of a snake, a bird and a cat that lived in ancient Egypt.
- Health & Medicine
By the numbers: How infectious measles and other diseases spread
A number called R0 measures how contagious an infectious disease is. It helps explain why measles is so dangerous.
- Animals
Yes, cats know their own names
Cats can tell their names apart from other spoken words. A new study supports what cat owners the world over had suspected.
- Environment
Pacific garbage patch may be 16 times bigger than thought
The giant ‘garbage patch’ that floats between Hawaii and California weighs at least 79,000 tons, a new estimate suggests.
- Planets
What the Curiosity rover has learned about Mars so far
Scientists take stock of what the Curiosity rover has learned after five years on Mars — and what else it may turn up in the next year or so.
- Genetics
Scientists hide a real movie within a germ’s DNA
A gene-editing technology called CRISPR helped scientists encode a short movie in the DNA of E. coli bacteria.
- Archaeology
DNA from African mummies tie these folk to Middle Easterners
Ancient DNA extracted from 90 Egyptian mummies reveals genetic links to Greece and the Middle East.
- Health & Medicine
Flu fighter found in frog slime
A protein found in the mucus secretions of an Indian frog can take down a type of flu virus, a new study finds.
- Science & Society
Fossils point to Neandertal diets — and medicine use
Whether Neandertals were largely meat-eaters or vegans depended on their environment, fossils now suggest. Their teeth also indicate they used natural medicines.
