Stone Age dentists didn’t drill and fill cavities. They scraped and coated them. Two teeth from a person who lived in what’s now northern Italy between 13,000 and 12,740 years ago bear signs of someone having scoured and removed infected soft, inner tissue. The treated area was then covered with bitumen, a sticky, tarlike substance […]

Last week, I wrote about how powerfully protective whooping cough vaccines can be when babies receive their first dose before even being born, from their pregnant mothers-to-be. As I was looking through that study, another of its findings struck me: Babies didn’t seem to get any extra whooping cough protection when their moms were vaccinated […]

An ancient tomb in southern China has provided the oldest known examples, in scaled-down form, of revolutionary weaving machines called pattern looms. Four immobile models of pattern looms illuminate how weavers first produced silk textiles with repeating patterns. The cloths were traded across Eurasia via the Silk Road, Chinese archaeologists report in the April Antiquity. […]

Fossils of a humanlike species with some puzzlingly ancient skeletal quirks are surprisingly young, its discoverers say. It now appears that this hominid, dubbed Homo naledi, inhabited southern Africa close to 300,000 years ago, around the dawn of Homo sapiens. H. naledi achieved worldwide acclaim in 2015 as a possibly pivotal player in the evolution […]

Europe, not Africa, might have spawned the first members of the human evolutionary family around 7 million years ago, researchers say. Tooth characteristics of a chimpanzee-sized primate that once lived in southeastern Europe suggest that the primate, known as Graecopithecus, may have been a hominid, not an ape as many researchers assume. One tooth in […]

Jupiter’s scientific portrait is getting repainted. NASA’s Juno spacecraft swooped within about 5,000 kilometers of Jupiter’s cloud tops on August 27, 2016, giving scientists their first intimate look at the gas giant. The data are revealing surprising details about Jupiter’s gravity, powerful magnetic field and ammonia-rich weather system. The findings, which appear in two studies […]

Mutations that prevent cells from spell-checking their DNA may make cancer cells vulnerable to immunotherapies, a new study suggests. A type of immune therapy known as PD-1 blockade controlled cancer in 77 percent of patients with defects in DNA mismatch repair — the system cells use to spell-check and fix errors in DNA (SN Online: […]

Earth’s dry regions have more trees than once thought — a hopeful note in the fight against climate change. An analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery reveals that drylands globally have 40 to 47 percent more tree cover (an extra 467 million hectares) than reported in earlier estimates. An international team of researchers used Google Earth […]

Walls can’t talk, but scientists can now read stories written in their subatomic particles. And that could make it harder to store radioactive material in secret. Nuclear radiation rearranges the electrons in insulators such as brick, glass and porcelain. So comparing the positions of electrons in atoms at different spots on walls, windows and floors […]

Venus may have been all wet early on. New simulations suggest that if the now-hellish planet had just the right amount of cloud cover, carbon dioxide and water to start with, Venus could have formed an ocean. The result, published online July 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, provides a new clue to […]