Vol. 203 No. 5
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More Stories from the March 11, 2023 issue

  1. Health & Medicine

    How fingerprints form was a mystery — until now

    A theory proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1950s helps explain how fingerprint patterns such as arches and whorls arise.

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  2. Animals

    A newfound ‘croakless’ frog may communicate via touch

    A newly discovered frog species in Tanzania joins a rare group of frogs that don’t croak or ribbit.

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  3. Physics

    Here’s why icicles made from pure water don’t form ripples

    A new study explains why icicles made from pure water have irregular shapes rather than the ripples typical of the salty icicles found in nature.

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  4. Life

    76 percent of well-known insects fall outside protected areas

    Protected areas can provide safe havens for insects, but many existing ones fall short, a new study finds.

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  5. Anthropology

    Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

    Finds in Kenya push Oldowan tool use back to around 2.9 million years ago, roughly 300,000 years earlier than previous evidence.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Psychedelics may improve mental health by getting inside nerve cells

    Psychedelics can get inside neurons, causing them to grow. This might underlie the drugs’ potential in combatting mental health disorders.

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  7. Climate

    Rapid melting is eroding vulnerable cracks in Thwaites Glacier’s underbelly

    Thwaites is melting slower than thought, but the worst of it is concentrated in underbelly cracks, threatening the Antarctica glacier’s stability.

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  8. Climate

    Climate ‘teleconnections’ may link droughts and fires across continents

    Far-reaching climate patterns like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation may synchronize droughts and regulate scorching of much of Earth’s burned area.

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  9. Physics

    The standard model of particle physics passed one of its strictest tests yet

    An experiment with a single electron, trapped for months on end, produced one of the most precise tests yet of the standard model of particle physics.

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  10. Astronomy

    The Kuiper Belt’s dwarf planet Quaoar hosts an impossible ring

    Quaoar’s ring lies outside the Roche limit, an imaginary line beyond which rings aren’t thought to be stable.

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  11. Animals

    Cockatoos can tell when they need more than one tool to swipe a snack

    Cockatoos know when it will take a stick and a straw to nab a nut in a puzzle box. The birds join chimps as the only known nonhumans to use a tool kit.

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  12. Animals

    Fish can recognize themselves in photos, further evidence they may be self-aware

    Cleaner fish recognize themselves in mirrors and photos, suggesting that far more animals may be self-aware than previously thought.

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  13. Paleontology

    In the wake of history’s deadliest mass extinction, ocean life may have flourished

    Ocean life may have recovered in just a million years after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, fossils from South China suggest.

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