Behind every peach you bite into is the work of countless human generations.The fuzzy, sweet stone fruit traces back to China, where it has been cultivated for more than 8,000 years. It wasn’t until the 1500s that Spanish colonists carried...
Staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria can enter the body via skin woundsScott Camazine/Alamy A patch that zaps the skin with electrical pulses could be used before or after surgery to prevent bacteria on the skin from causing blood poisoning, reducing our reliance...
The new battery could be assembled from Martian materialsNASA When pushed into the smallest of cracks, water can be used in unexpected ways. A new battery design that relies on tiny amounts of water confined within layers of clay could...
Wreckage from the 2023 wildfire in Lahaina, HawaiiRick Bowmer/Associated Press/Alamy Wildfires in the western US aren’t only growing bigger. They are also growing faster, putting millions of people and properties at greater risk. “In the context of home destruction and...
The gut microbiome is hugely diverse – and the microorganisms don’t live in harmonyShutterstock Your gut is a battleground where rival tribes of bacteria armed with poison darts fight for territory – and these battles are often won by armies...
Compounds called pyrenes have been detected in the Taurus molecular cloudESO A complex form of carbon crucial for life on Earth has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time. Its presence helps show how the compounds needed...
October 24, 20243 min readThese Hornets Can Thrive on Just Alcohol without Getting BuzzedSocial wasps can hold their liquorBy Rachel BerkowitzThree hornets feed on a ripe fig, which could provide naturally occurring ethanol. An alcohol-only diet would throw most species...
We are living in a golden age of apples, a time of delicious, diverse, mouth-watering abundance that we could barely have imagined at the turn of the millennium. How did we get to a time when most of us, most...
AS THE old joke goes, when I read about the dangers of smoking, I gave up reading. If you are a vaper, you might feel like you want to stop reading now. Don’t: you need to know this. I am...
The 17th Feedback Feedback is feeling peculiar. The mood swings are even more drastic than usual, to the point of constituting a whole new personality. It is as if, like a Time Lord, Feedback has taken an insufficiently homeopathic dose...
