Real science. Scandalous headlines. Every claim true.
The morgue
Search every carefully sourced outrage in circulation.
Researchers uncover parasites that manipulate their hosts into performing bizarre and sometimes fatal behaviors. Swimming lessons, dangerous attractions, and unauthorized construction projects linked to biological manipulation.
The world's driest desert has its long dry streak called into question. An 8.8-million-year-old capybara relative points to persistent freshwater habitats in this hyperarid landscape.
The cap and stalk are only the visible part of a sprawling fungal network. Beneath the spectacle lies a web of microscopic filaments called hyphae.
Wheat, rice, corn, and oats have been hiding a fruit wall in plain sight. A cereal grain is not just a seed. It is a fruit fused so tightly to its seed that the two look like one structure.
Two Jurassic fossils from Wyoming reveal a bizarrely broad belemnite rostrum and extend the known history of an ancient cephalopod lineage. Paleontology would like everyone to stop calling it a squid butt. We respectfully decline.
Cells don’t just grow, divide, and stick around forever. Programmed cell death helps sculpt developing tissues, maintain healthy cell populations, control immune cells, and remove cells before they cause trouble. Sometimes the healthiest thing a cell can do is leave.
It turns out “spider silk” is a whole materials portfolio. Sylvie’s web uses specialized protein-based fibers for different jobs, and support lines, capture threads, attachments, and wrapping fibers are not all made from the same silk.
Tiny movements, huge forces, terrible bedside acoustics. The scanner’s deafening racket comes from microscopic mechanical motion inside a powerful magnetic field. The scanner insists the banging is a normal part of spatial encoding.
Original genetic instructions stay behind in the main office. Cells copy genetic information into RNA, then use many of those messages to build proteins.
Wildlife survey exposes a classic ecological problem: absence is surprisingly hard to prove. Also, researchers learn that where you put the camera matters almost as much as having one.
Mendeleev predicts missing members of the periodic table decades before atomic structure is understood. Future discoveries of gallium, scandium, and germanium provide an inconvenient amount of evidence.
New species grows at 145°F and survives even hotter conditions by shutting down into a protective state. Scientists already knew microbes could thrive in hot springs, but this one is a more complex eukaryote.