“For papers that bomb, there was no difference; women and men ended up on papers with zero citations at equal rates. But for a reasonably successful paper (one that gets cited 25 times), women are about 20 percent less likely than men to end up on the author list.”
“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that circulate in modern rodent populations.”
“The pellets are filled with fish scales that match a type of ray-finned fish found in that same location. The authors determined that these were gastric pellets rather than coprolites due to their shape and the location in which they were found in association with the pterosaurs.”
“That left the much rarer Type Ia supernova as the strongest candidate, events that generally occur once or twice each century in a given galaxy. These supernovas are the source of most of the iron in the universe, and such an event is the best match for the Hypatia stone’s unusual chemical makeup.”
“[I]n this case, the unseen companion was producing copious amounts of radiation that was heating the star. This process essentially produces a star with a ‘daytime’ side bathed in radiation, so it’s more energetic and brighter, and a ‘nighttime’ side that emits the star’s intrinsic brightness.”
“If you do a meta-analysis of all the publications resulting from trials that weren’t preregistered, homeopathic treatments outperformed placebo by a statistically significant margin. If you look at the publications that resulted from trials that had been preregistered, there was no statistical difference between homeopathy and placebo.”
“Nearly every one of the 382 stone tools unearthed at Xiamabei is less than four centimeters long; making and using these smaller blades would have allowed early humans to do more work with less material. Handles helped make the tools easier to grip and more versatile; [Fa-Gang] Wang and his colleagues found one bladelet with part of a bone haft still attached to the stone.”
“[Ludovic] Slimak and his colleagues say that there was probably less than a year between the end of Neanderthal occupation here, in Layer F, and the time our species moved in, in Layer E. That makes it very likely that the two species actually met and interacted at the site, or somewhere very nearby.”
“Sometimes the birds would lose a tool, leaving it out of reach inside the cage. In that case, they’d reach for another tool but wouldn’t use it to retrieve the food—instead, they’d retrieve the first tool, then use that to get the food. One individual went three layers deep into this sort of recursion.”
“From the 40 [vacuumed DNA] samples they took, the team members identified 49 different species, from a rhino down to the guppies in the Rainforest Room. … Some of the detected species — such as the water vole and red squirrel — weren’t even zoo animals; they were just nearby.”
“The 21st-dynasty priests made extensive repairs to Amenhotep I’s mummy. For instance, they reattached the severed head with a resin-treated linen band, reattached limbs and fingers, tightened loose bandages, and placed two new amulets into the mummy.”
“The Norse may have been at the site slightly earlier, but they were definitely there and cutting down trees by 1021. Based on the development stages of certain cells in the waney layer, Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues say that one of the trees was cut down in the spring, while another was cut down in the summer or fall.”
“[T]he Iron Age sample also had a high abundance of two species of fungi: Penicillium roqueforti — commonly used in the fermentation of cheese — and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, used for fermenting bread and alcoholic beverages like beer, mead, and wine.”
“[T]he pfhrp2 deletions had arisen recently and hadn’t had time for mutation and recombination to scramble the DNA sequences nearby. So, all the [malaria] parasites that carry the pfhrp2 deletion seemed to have inherited it from the same ancestor, that ancestor was very recent, and there was a selective pressure that was driving the expansion of parasites that inherited the deletion.”
“Bennett and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated seeds from the layer just below the oldest footprints and the layer just above the most recent ones. According to the results, the oldest footprints were made sometime after 23,000 years ago; the most recent ones were made sometime before 21,000 years ago.”