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Ants crawl and tunnel their way through almost every landmass on Earth today – except Antarctica and some remote or inhospitable islands. This wasn’t always the case, but new research suggests that ants had made their way into global ecosystems earlier than previously thought. “Our team has discovered a new fossil ant species representing the earliest undisputable geological record of ants,” says Anderson Lepeco from the Museum of Zoology of the University of [...]

Complex language is something that sets humans apart from other animals. But when did this unique capacity for intricate communication emerge? Linguists have postulated that there may be an ancient language that sits at the root of all modern languages. This theory was strengthened in the 19th and 20th centuries with the discovery of links between the Indo-European language groups, leading to the suggestion of an ancient Proto-Indo-European language which would have been spoken up to 7,000 [...]

Researchers have discovered a new species of flea toad in which one of the adults measured just 6.95mm in length – the second smallest adult vertebrate ever described. Vertebrates are animals with a spine, which includes all fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. But this new flea toad, Brachycephalus dacnis, which was found in the Atlantic Rainforest in Ubatuba on the coast of Brazil, is tiny. Only one related species of the genus is known to be smaller. “There [...]

When an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, it caused a mass extinction. Now researchers have evidence that this catastrophe ushered in the invention of agriculture by ants. “Extinction events can be huge disasters for most organisms, but it can actually be positive for others,” says Ted Schultz, curator of ants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and senior author of the paper. “At the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs did not do very well, [...]

Brazilian researchers have discovered the COVID-19 virus in sperm up to 3 months after infection, which they say should make people think carefully about the time babies might be conceived. Details of the new study, in the journal Andrology, revealed the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, can remain inside sperm for up to 3 months following hospital discharge (100-110 days after initial infection). Based on their results, the researchers from the University of São Paulo [...]

Luzio, a 10,000-year-old skeleton from São Paulo, Brazil, has some familiar-looking DNA. He belongs to the same genetic population as all modern-day Indigenous peoples of the Americas, according to new research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Luzio was previously thought to have possibly belonged to a different, older, population, who settled in modern-day Brazil around 14,000 years ago. “Genetic analysis showed Luzio to be an Amerindian, like the Tupi, [...]

Benjamin Franklin strode outside one day in 1752, flew his kite in a thunderstorm, and discovered electricity when it got struck by lightning. Right? Well, no. There are several inaccuracies in that sentence. Franklin performed the experiment while remaining under shelter, there was no lightning strike, and he certainly didn’t discover electricity – he just confirmed the link between lightning and sparks made by other things he and his peers had been tinkering with, [...]

A group of researchers have found a way to make vaccines 25% more effective – using an old chemical trick. They’ve developed a substance that, at least in a lab-based study, significantly boosts an immune response. The discovery revolves around the concept of chirality. Chiral things are asymmetrical in a way that means they can be physically identical, but visually different. Your hands are the most obvious example of chirality: while your left and right hands are [...]

Research uncovers their dynamics and interactions.