/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Beneath churchyards in London and Lincolnshire lie the chemical echoes of famine, infection and survival preserved in the teeth of those who lived through some of the most catastrophic periods in English history. /news/2025-07-medieval-skeletons-reveal-childhood-malnutrition.html Archaeology Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:50:06 EDT news673184539 Have you ever stopped by the grocery store on your way to a dinner party to grab a bottle of wine? Did you grab the first one you saw, or did you pause to think about the available choices and deliberate over where you wanted your gift to be from? /news/2025-07-guests-feast-iran-zagros-mountains.html Archaeology Fri, 11 Jul 2025 09:20:01 EDT news671444075 In 1931, the SkhÅ«l I fossil was uncovered at Mugharat es-SkhÅ«l (the Cave of the Children), also known as SkhÅ«l Cave, Israel. It forms part of the oldest intentional human burials ever discovered, dating back to ca. 140,000 years ago. For decades, it became the topic of much debate over its taxonomic classification. Today it is widely attributed to Homo sapiens. /news/2025-07-analysis-skhl-skull-oldest-human.html Archaeology Thu, 10 Jul 2025 06:30:01 EDT news671267501 Evidence of the permanent impact of smoking on people's teeth has been uncovered by researchers for the first time. Researchers from Northumbria University have discovered that smokers have telltale signs of their smoking habits ingrained deep within their teeth, which remain even after a person has quit. /news/2025-06-analysis-tooth-uncovers-impact-clues.html Molecular & Computational biology Wed, 18 Jun 2025 13:42:21 EDT news669472936 A new study of the Gobi Wall in the Gobi highland desert of Mongolia reveals a multifunctional role beyond defense; data from the James Webb Space Telescope is bringing physicists closer to resolving the Hubble tension; and a U.S.-based team of astronomers stumbled on a new dwarf planet in the outer solar system while searching for Planet Nine. /news/2025-05-saturday-citations-wages-welfare-teeth.html Other Sat, 31 May 2025 08:30:01 EDT news667823007 Ever wondered why our teeth are so sensitive to pain or even just cold drinks? It might be because they first evolved for a very different purpose than chewing half a billion years ago, a study suggested Wednesday. /news/2025-05-teeth-million-year-fish.html Paleontology & Fossils Sun, 25 May 2025 13:30:01 EDT news667052799 Anyone who has ever squirmed through a dental cleaning can tell you how sensitive teeth can be. This sensitivity gives important feedback about temperature, pressure—and yes, pain—as we bite and chew our food. However, the sensitive parts inside the hard enamel first evolved for something quite different. /news/2025-05-teeth-evolved-sensory-tissue-armored.html Evolution Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 21 May 2025 11:00:10 EDT news667039381 When children lose their baby teeth, there is an adult set already growing beneath the gums, ready to emerge. But if we lose our permanent teeth, there aren't any more waiting in the wings. Right now, the options for replacing these lost teeth are either dentures or titanium implants, neither of which provide the same function and feedback as a real, living tooth. /news/2025-04-pigs-regrow-adult-teeth-humans.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:05:20 EDT news664819509 Bone tools have been created by hominins for millions of years, with the earliest evidence for the manufacture of deliberately shaped bone tools dating to approximately 1.4 to 0.7 million years ago in Ethiopia. In Europe, the earliest evidence of bone tool production dates back to the Middle Pleistocene during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11. /news/2025-04-earliest-evidence-ivory-tool-production.html Archaeology Thu, 10 Apr 2025 07:00:01 EDT news663422097 A new study published in PeerJ reveals that the teeth of South American sea lions (Otaria byronia) hold valuable clues about past population dynamics. Researchers from the Instituto de Biología de Organismos Marinos, the Centro para el Estudio de Sistemas Marinos, and the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco analyzed changes in tooth size and growth layer groups (GLGs) over the past century. Their findings suggest that tooth size can serve as a reliable indicator of density-dependent effects on somatic growth. /news/2025-03-tooth-size-south-american-sea.html Ecology Paleontology & Fossils Sat, 08 Mar 2025 11:30:01 EST news660576522 Research led by the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Ohio University has found evidence of hominin activity at a Romanian fossil site dating to at least 1.95 million years ago. This discovery pushes back the known date of European hominins by half a million years and establishes Grăunceanu as the oldest confirmed European evidence of hominin activity. /news/2025-01-romanian-fossils-hominins-europe-years.html Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 22 Jan 2025 14:44:50 EST news656779486 Babies were weaned earlier in cities in the Roman Empire than in smaller and more rural communities, according to a study of ancient teeth. Urban weaning patterns more closely hewed to guidelines from ancient Roman physicians, mirroring contemporary patterns of adherence to medical experts in urban and rural communities. /news/2025-01-ancient-teeth-reveal-roman-urbanites.html Archaeology Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:52:03 EST news656070721 A UAB study in collaboration with the UVic-UCC and the ALBA synchrotron concludes that the Iberian culture newborns buried within domestic spaces died of natural causes, such as complications during labor or premature births, and not due to ritual practices. /news/2024-10-microscopic-teeth-reveals-mystery-iberian.html Archaeology Wed, 09 Oct 2024 14:37:04 EDT news647703421 Kilat, the largest living lizard at the Toronto Metro Zoo, like other members of his species (Varanus komodoensis), truly deserves to be called the Komodo dragon. His impressive size and the way he looks at you and tracks your every move makes you realize that he is an apex predator, not unlike a ferocious theropod dinosaur. /news/2024-02-adult-komodo-teeth-similar-theropod.html Plants & Animals Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 07 Feb 2024 14:38:03 EST news626539081 Evidence from teeth reveals that vitamin D deficiency during childhood was likely a major issue in industrialized England, according to a study published January 31, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Anne Marie Snoddy of the University of Otago, New Zealand and colleagues. /news/2024-01-archaeological-evidence-seasonal-vitamin-d.html Archaeology Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:00:01 EST news625914950 About 350 million years ago, your evolutionary ancestors—and the ancestors of all modern vertebrates—were merely soft-bodied animals living in the oceans. In order to survive and evolve to become what we are today, these animals needed to gain some protection and advantage over the ocean's predators, which were then dominated by crustaceans. /news/2023-07-fish-evolved-bony-scaly-armor.html Evolution Cell & Microbiology Mon, 17 Jul 2023 16:55:04 EDT news608831701 Traces of sex hormones extracted from a woolly mammoth's tusk provide the first direct evidence that adult males experienced musth, a testosterone-driven episode of heightened aggression against rival males, according to a new University of Michigan-led study. /news/2023-05-tusk-analysis-techniques-reveal-surging-testosterone.html Plants & Animals Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 03 May 2023 11:00:01 EDT news602327651 A new study, led by a researcher from the Centre for Oral, Clinical & Translational Sciences at King's College London, has identified key differences in tooth replacement between snakes and other reptiles, and identified the mechanism that allows snakes to shed their old teeth. /news/2023-02-unique-snakes-teeth.html Plants & Animals Evolution Fri, 17 Feb 2023 10:11:48 EST news595851106 Living sharks are often portrayed as the apex predators of the marine realm. Paleontologists have been able to identify fossils of their extinct ancestors that date back hundreds of millions of years to a time known as the Palaeozoic period. These early "sharks," known as acanthodians, bristled with spines. In contrast to modern sharks, they developed bony "armor" around their paired fins. /news/2022-09-ancient-shark-china-humans-oldest.html Evolution Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 28 Sep 2022 11:00:05 EDT news583578949 For the first time, researchers successfully captured CT images of an entire wooly mammoth tusk, according to a new "Images in Radiology" article published in the journal Radiology. Researchers were able to do a full scan of the tusk in its entirety—or in toto—using a newer clinical CT scanner. The new technology allows for large-scale imaging without having to do multiple partial scans. /news/2022-08-ct-scanner-captures-entire-wooly.html Biotechnology Paleontology & Fossils Tue, 09 Aug 2022 14:33:22 EDT news579274398 Fossil tooth analysis by Southern Cross University geochemist Dr. Renaud Joannes-Boyau has played a central role in an international collaboration that has properly identified the earliest humans. /news/2022-07-fossil-tooth-analysis-earliest-humans.html Archaeology Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:32:03 EDT news577006321 The diet of fossil extinct animals can hold clues to their lifestyle, behavior, evolution and ultimately extinction. However, studying an animal's diet after millions of years is difficult due to the poor preservation of chemical dietary indicators in organic material on these timescales. An international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, applied a new method to investigate the diet of the largest shark to have ever existed, the iconic Otodus megalodon. This new method investigates the zinc isotope composition of the highly mineralized part of teeth and proves to be particularly helpful to decipher the diet of these extinct animals. /news/2022-05-great-white-sharks-contributed-megalodon.html Ecology Paleontology & Fossils Tue, 31 May 2022 11:00:01 EDT news573212865 Paleontologists have discovered sets of fossils representing three new ichthyosaurs that may have been among the largest animals to have ever lived, reports a new paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. /news/2022-04-huge-ichthyosaur-largest-animals-uncovered.html Plants & Animals Paleontology & Fossils Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:01 EDT news570294228 In a new study published in Evolution, biologists laid to rest a century-old debate by confirming that a single species of frog, out of the more than 7,000 living today, has true teeth on its lower jaw. The culprit, a large marsupial frog named Gastrotheca guentheri, has puzzled scientists since its discovery in 1882 for possessing what appeared to be a complete set of jagged, daggerlike teeth on the top and bottom of its mouth.  /news/2021-11-species-extinct-frog-true-teeth.html Evolution Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:29:57 EST news555766193 A wide variety of animals have tusks, from elephants and walruses to five-pound, guinea pig-looking critters called hyraxes. But one thing tusked animals have in common is that they're all mammals—there are no known fish, reptiles, or birds with tusks. In a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paleontologists traced the first tusks back to ancient mammal relatives that lived before the dinosaurs, and to do so, they had to define what makes a tusk a tusk in the first place. /news/2021-10-fossil-dental-exams-reveal-tusks.html Evolution Paleontology & Fossils Tue, 26 Oct 2021 19:00:01 EDT news554471582 The cremation process destroys a lot of information that can usually be obtained from the human skeleton. Diseases are especially difficult to observe. This has caused a paucity in our knowledge of the disease load in populations that practiced cremation as their main funerary ritual. Dr. Barbara Veselka and Prof. Christophe Snoeck, of the Brussels Bioarchaeology Lab and research groups MARI and AMGC for the first time have detected vitamin D deficiency in cremated human remains. /news/2021-10-interglobular-dentine-cremated-human-teeth.html Archaeology Mon, 25 Oct 2021 11:59:00 EDT news554381938 A new U of T study has discovered the oldest known cavities ever found in a mammal, the likely result of a diet that included eating fruit. /news/2021-09-prehistoric-primates-sweet-tooth.html Paleontology & Fossils Thu, 09 Sep 2021 11:00:02 EDT news550399647 Scientists recently made news by using fossil shark scales to reconstruct shark communities from millions of years ago. At the same time, an international team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara ecologist Erin Dillon applied the technique to the more recent past. /news/2021-07-fossil-shark-scales-glimpse-reef.html Ecology Mon, 05 Jul 2021 15:00:02 EDT news544680621 Scientific analysis of the distinct eating habits of two societies in northern Peru 6,000 years ago has allowed a team of Vanderbilt researchers to draw new conclusions about how complex sociopolitical structures took shape in ancient Andean societies. /news/2020-12-analysis-ancient-teeth-reveal-clues.html Archaeology Social Sciences Wed, 16 Dec 2020 08:52:42 EST news527331159 When most people think of ferocious, blade-like teeth on prehistoric creatures they picture Smilodon, better known as the saber-toothed tiger. But in the world of dinosaurs, theropods are well known for having blade-like teeth with serrated cutting edges used for biting and ripping their prey. And until recently, the complex arrangement of tissues that gave rise to these terrifying teeth was considered unique to these meat-eating dinosaurs. /news/2020-12-prehistoric-dinosaurs-mammals-teeth.html Plants & Animals Evolution Tue, 15 Dec 2020 19:00:01 EST news527239156