Once is apparently enough for male dark fishing spiders. After delivering only half of their available sperm to a single female, males curl up and wait for death. In the considerable annals of spider sex ending badly, male Dolomedes tenebrosus suffer a fate not described before, says behavioral ecologist Steven K. Schwartz of the University ... Read more
A mysterious gap in a star’s dusty shell of debris could be the signature of a young planet circling its sun at twice the distance of Pluto’s orbit. If it does exist, the far-flung planet’s birth may be hard for astronomers to explain. “If this is a planet, it is extremely challenging for existing planet ... Read more
Two drugs already on the market for other purposes can halt Ebola virus in mice. The findings open the way for further testing of the drugs, clomiphene and toremifene, against the deadly virus. Scientists screened more than 2,000 drugs against Ebola, a process that required the highest level of safety precautions because the virus is ... Read more
Stone Age people may have carried land snails on a voyage from the Pyrenees to Ireland, an examination of the snails’ DNA reveals. Scientists have struggled to explain why Ireland shares some plant and animal species with the Iberian Peninsula, but not with the rest of Europe or the British Isles. For example, Cepaea nemoralis ... Read more
A new, deadly respiratory virus spreads easily in hospital settings, a team of investigators has found. The virus, called the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or MERS, reminds Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Trish Perl of SARS. “The cases are eerily similar,” she says. Perl and two colleagues investigated a SARS outbreak in Toronto 10 years ... Read more
Laser pulses beamed from a low-flying airplane into northwestern Cambodia’s dense jungles have revealed ancient remnants of extensive, carefully planned settlements of rice farmers. These settlements were part of Angkor, the capital of the region’s Khmer empire. Angkor flourished from around 900 to 1500, but forests now obscure much of the city’s urban sprawl. Laser ... Read more
Cabbages with jet lag are less nutritious and more vulnerable to insect pests.Fruits and vegetables have an internal clock that can be reset by a daily cycle of light and dark, but storing produce in darkened refrigerators could disrupt this natural rhythm, researchers report June 20 in Current Biology. Plants, even after being cropped from ... Read more
A new 3-D map of the brain is the best thing since sliced cold cuts, at least to some neuroscientists.“It’s a remarkable tour-de-force to reconstruct an entire human brain with such accuracy,” says David Van Essen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. Using a high-tech deli slicer and about 100,000 computer processors, researchers ... Read more
Men who don’t produce sperm face nearly three times the risk of cancer compared with the male population average, researchers report June 20 in Fertility and Sterility. About 4 million men in the United States are infertile, with a host of causes. Of them, about 600,000 men don’t deliver sperm from the testes to the ... Read more
An exotic subatomic particle could be the first amalgamation of more than three quarks — a fundamental building block of atoms — to be produced experimentally. If it is what physicists think it is, the particle could provide clues about the force that holds nuclei together and perhaps about the earliest moments of the universe. “We have ... Read more