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The math used to analyze cyclic phenomena like the ebb and flow of ocean tides has been applied to Sol, the star we orbit. While it can't do anything to flatten its irregularities, or the impacts it has on communications, temperature, and weather, the "Sun clock" created by scholars shows it starts and stops on a much more precise schedule than can be discerned by observations plotted linearly over time.

Humans do not hibernate, but in science-fiction films long-distance travel often involves "suspended animation" where muscular atrophy, starvation, and oxygen deprivation don't occur. Mice don't hibernate either but they just did in experiments. Mice are obviously not little people, that is why claims involving mice are in the exploratory camp, but animals models are often a waypoint on the path to humans.

Well-preserved footprints from the Lower Cretaceous Jinju Formation of South Korea, 110 million years ago, show that an ancestor of modern-day crocodiles, named Batrachopus grandis, walked on two feet.Palaeontologists knew that some crocodiles from the "age of dinosaurs" were more adapted to life on land than their modern relatives but those were smaller creatures, about three feet long with footprints showing they walked on all fours. Batrachopus grandis was instead 12 feet in size and bipedal. It is more like a Gorn from the television show "Star Trek" than what we think of as a crocodile.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger is a popular phrase, but how true it ever was is unclear. Bones are not stronger after they break and while some people relax about small drama after real trauma, many also become more sensitized to stress instead of more resilient.

Ten years ago science journalists talked about functional MRI (fMRI) scans all of the time. Because if a part of the brain lit up when someone did, said, or read something, it went into a paper. Few asked who was doing the interpreting, how legitimate the scale was, and if it had any scientific relevance. We got media claims that fMRI would predict behavior and the resulting media attention caused scholars to rush to produce even more fMRI papers.

Cover crops are touted for their soil and water quality related benefits. A new paper found that incorporating cover crops with tillage results in increased cover crop decomposition rates and increased mineralization of nutrients from cover crop biomass.
Other studies have reported mixed results for corn-soybean grain yields when planted after cover crops.

A new paper uses a combination of cosmic voids – large expanding bubbles of space containing very few galaxies – and the faint imprint of sound waves in the very early Universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations, that can be seen in the distribution of galaxies, to show how large structures in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe can provide the most precise tests of dark energy and cosmic expansion yet.

Though "energy medicine" and "oxygenated herbs" promoted by CNN's Chris Cuomo are woo, one notion ridiculed by journalists has merit; using light to disinfect areas and kill coronavirus.Though chemicals are most common, they are not always practical or portable. Ultraviolet radiation in the 200 to 300 nanometer range will destroy the virus, it just requires UV radiation sources that emit sufficiently high doses of UV light. Current devices are things like expensive mercury-containing gas discharge lamps, which require high power, have a relatively short lifetime, and are bulky. 

A new paper posits that fluctuating estrogen levels may make alcohol more rewarding. The giant caveat is that the study was in mice, and despite what you may read in corporate media, mice are not little people, so this research is firmly in the "exploratory" part of science. 

We know dogs will try to rescue humans, those Lassie stories were based on events that have happened for as long as humans and dogs have co-existed, but simply observing dogs rescuing someone doesn't tell you much about dogs' actual interest in rescuing humansSo psychologists at Arizona State University set up an experiment assessing 60 pet dogs' propensity to rescue their owners. None of the dogs had any kind of rescue training. 

In high school biology you learned that in humans, a normal cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes; 22 autosomes, which are the same in both males and females, while in the 23rd, the sex chromosomes, females have two copies of the X chromosome while males have one X and one Y.Their differences don't stop there. Chromosome pairs are numbered according to size, pair 1 being largest and 23 the smallest. And the Y is tiny compared to the X. X contains thousands of genes critical for life while the Y provides the instructions for initiating male development and making sperm.Exactly how they work together during meiosis, the form of cell division that creates sperm and egg, contains a science mystery.

A 425-million-year-old Kampecaris obanensis millipede fossil is the world's oldest "bug." It is older than any known fossil of an insect, arachnid or other related creepy-crawly and it was found on the Scottish island of Kerrera.It's about 75 million years younger than the age other scientists have estimated the oldest millipede to be using a technique known as molecular clock dating, which is based on DNA's mutation rate. Other research using fossil dating found that the oldest fossil of a land-dwelling, stemmed plant (also from Scotland) is 425 million years old and 75 million years younger than molecular clock estimates.