Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains
Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but…
Wounded orangutan seen using plant as medicine
A Sumatran orangutan in Indonesia has self-medicated using a paste made from plants to heal a large wound on his cheek, say scientists. It is the first time a creature…
Coronavirus found in samples from 96% of flights
The concentration of a virus in wastewater can paint a picture of how much COVID-19 is present in that community. Testing at airports can help provide context for how prevalent…
The Mushroom at the End of the World
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book…
The world’s humblest heroes, from plumbers to tardigrades
Inspired by The Super Mario Bros Movie, we're talking about a humble class of heroes whose lives are devoted to infrastructure maintenance and repair. There are heating engineer rogues and…
Car tires are major source of ocean microplastics – study
Wind-borne microplastics are a bigger source of ocean pollution than rivers, say scientists More than 200,000 tonnes of tiny plastic particles are blown from roads into the oceans every year,…
Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study
A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows. The pioneering study of…
How Ada Lovelace Constructed Her Wings
When Annabella Millbanke had a daughter with her husband, Lord Byron, she was terrified that their child might inherit his poetical madness. And so she steered the girl, Ada, toward…
Plague, leprosy & murder: unlocking the secrets of medieval bones
What secrets can medieval human remains unlock? With exciting new developments in the science of palaeopathology, researchers are able to glean much more from human bones than ever before. Speaking…