The use of insects as food for humans and animals has both the potential to reduce European consumers’ carbon footprint and contribute to reducing incentives for continued soybean cultivation in the Amazon rainforest. However, when compared to feeding insects to farm animals, the direct human consumption of insects has the biggest potential to reduce our…

Spider silk is useful for a variety of biomedical applications: It exhibits mechanical properties superior to synthetic fibers for tissue engineering, and it is not toxic or harmful to living cells. One unexpected application for spider silk is its use in the creation of biocompatible lenses for biological imaging applications. Researchers now describe the feasibility…

Rethinking what we eat is essential if we hope to nourish ourselves sustainably and mind the climate. One option is to seek out alternative food sources from the sea. All the way at the bottom, where algae, cephalopods and tiny fish thrive, according to a new study. More and more people are opting to become…

Scientists have discovered the first evidence of a unique respiratory infection in the fossilized remains of a dinosaur that lived nearly 150 million years ago. Researchers examined the remains of an immature diplodocid — a long-necked herbivorous sauropod dinosaur, like ‘Brontosaurus’ — dating back to the Late Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era. The dinosaur…

Since the discovery of the first fossil remains, the image of the Neanderthal has been one of a primitive hominin. People have known for a long time that Neanderthals were able to fashion tools and weapons. But could they also make jewellery or even art? Researchers analyzed a new find from the Unicorn Cave in…

Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater. Death by asteroid rather than by a series of volcanic eruptions or some other global…

A computer game that induces mice to experience hallucination-like events could be a key to understanding the neurobiological roots of psychosis, according to a new study. A new study, however, shows there are important links between human and mouse minds in how they function — and malfunction. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in…

Researchers created a tailor-made gene sequencing method to accurately measure a biochemical, DNA tagging system, which switches genes on or off. This helped them study the system in any cell type, including human, plant and bacterial cells. While the results supported the idea that this system may occur naturally in non-bacterial cells, the levels were…

A team used fluorescence microscopy to analyze the supposed spider and differentiate what parts of the specimen were fossilized organism, and which parts were potentially doctored. The locals sold the fossil to scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in Liaoning, China, who published a description of the fossil species in Acta Geologica Sinica, the…

Rising as high as 20 feet, ancient stone monoliths in southern Ethiopia are 1,000 years older than scientists previously thought, according to a new study. A research team used advanced radiocarbon dating to determine the often phallic-shaped monoliths, or stelae, at the Sakaro Sodo archeological site in Ethiopia’s Gedeo zone were likely created sometime during…