Science
1179 verified facts in this category, showing 101–200.
- Stars near the Milky Way's galactic centre, called S-stars, orbit Sagittarius A* at very high speeds.
- When its first observations were released on June 23, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory had detected 2,104 new asteroids in seven nights, including seven near-Earth objects.
- Dawson and Reid (1997) reported that staying awake for 24 hours produced cognitive impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10%.
- Dark chocolate products can contain high levels of lead and cadmium.
- The overall shape of the Bianfu Cave forearm fragment is more similar to modern human arm bones than to Neanderthal arm bones, despite sharing some features with Neanderthal bones.
- Bianfu Cave yielded two skull fragments, four teeth, and part of a forearm bone from at least four Denisovan individuals who lived between 134,000 and 167,000 years ago.
- Researchers identified Denisovan remains at Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province, China, by analyzing proteins in more than 60,000 bone fragments, even though DNA was not preserved in the fossils.
- A foot bone of Homo luzonensis resembles bones of australopithecines, including Lucy, despite the species being much more recent.
- One upper premolar attributed to Homo luzonensis has three roots, a trait found in fewer than 3 percent of modern humans.
- Homo luzonensis was identified from seven teeth and six small bones representing at least three individuals, discovered in Callao Cave.
- Isochron burial dating determines age based on when material was last exposed to cosmic radiation that produces radioactive aluminum and beryllium isotopes, which then decay at a steady rate after burial.
- Ron Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand spent much of 15 years excavating the Little Foot fossil from rock deep inside the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg.
- The Little Foot fossil skeleton has more than 90 percent of its bones intact.
- A recent assessment found that six of the nine biophysical planetary boundaries that underpin a stable Earth system have already been transgressed.
- In a wild baboon population studied by Gesquiere et al. (2011), alpha males had cortisol levels elevated to a range typical of the lowest-ranking males, while the lowest cortisol levels were found in second-ranking males.
- Traces of SARS-CoV-2 were detected in open-sea water samples collected at different sites during the Sea Care project.
- Studies have shown that elite athletes such as tennis players can reach core temperatures as high as 40 degrees Celsius, associated with collapse from heat exhaustion.
- Field research conducted during the Black Saturday fires showed bushfire fighters did not get above 38.5°C core temperature.
- MIT Technology Review reported that a quarter of rare diseases take between 5 and 30 years to diagnose.
- The kallikrein-1 serine protease toxins found in solenodon venom evolved convergently with similar toxins found in venomous shrew venom.
- Pig remains from Durrington Walls showed widely varying strontium, oxygen, and sulfur isotope signatures, indicating different environments of origin, but similar carbon isotope signatures, indicating the pigs had eaten similar diets.
- In honest participants in Greene and Paxton's study, brain activity in the control network (including the anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) showed no significant difference between losses from an honest choice and unavoidable losses.
- In a 2009 PNAS study by Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton, activity in brain regions associated with cognitive control was associated with how often participants behaved dishonestly when given the opportunity.
- The 19-nucleotide sequence referenced in the SARS-CoV-2 genome is associated with the virus's furin cleavage site, which helps the virus infect cells.
- Alicia Curth and colleagues presented work arguing that double descent is an illusion caused by using parameter count as an inadequate measure of model complexity.
- A 2019 paper coauthored by Harvard's Boaz Barak showed that double descent can occur not only as models gain parameters, but also when they receive more training data or are trained for longer.
- Animals—including humans, dinosaurs, and trilobites—appeared only about 85 percent of the way through Earth's history.
- A tyrannosaur fossil from Montana, part of the 'Dueling Dinosaurs' specimens, was determined to belong to an approximately 20-year-old animal that had finished growing, supporting the case that it represents Nanotyrannus lancensis rather than a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.
- Comet 3I/ATLAS was traveling at approximately 137,000 miles per hour.
- In January 2025, surgeons in the United States performed the fourth gene-edited pig-kidney transplant.
- In 1964, Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours (about 11 days) and showed cognitive and behavioral changes as a result.
- During one hour of reading, the eyes may make as many as 10,000 coordinated movements.
- Scientists have developed methods to control brain cells with flashes of light by genetically altering the cells to react to light, with such studies performed using mouse cells.
- A neuron's axon can be up to 1 meter long.
- A single human mouth can contain more bacteria than there are people on Earth.
- Stomach size does not correlate with body weight; naturally thin people can have stomachs the same size as or larger than those of people who struggle with their weight.
- Norovirus resists freezing and heating to 60°C and is not eradicated by alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
- Women are twice as likely as men to develop lung cancer among nonsmokers.
- At least 20% of people who develop lung cancer are nonsmokers, according to Catherine Madaffari, M.D.
- A newly discovered partial foot fossil found in Ethiopia belonged to an unknown hominin species that was adapted more for climbing than for walking.
- Scientists sequenced the oldest and most complete ancient Egyptian genome yet recovered, from a man who lived about 4,500 years ago, finding 80 percent of his DNA came from Neolithic North African groups and 20 percent from populations in West Asia.
- The Lagar Velho child's skeleton also has a sloping chin region, evidence of well-developed arm musculature, and relatively short lower legs—features characteristic of Neanderthals.
- Older female mice, equivalent in age to 60-year-old women, lived about 12 percent longer when given daily injections of the active ingredient in Ozempic compared to mice that did not receive the drug.
- The first gravitational wave detected by LIGO was produced by the merger of two black holes approximately 1.3 billion years ago.
- Chemical evidence from Australia's Barney Creek Formation indicates that eukaryotes—organisms with clearly defined cell nuclei—existed at least 1.6 billion years ago.
- Paleontologists concluded that Tyrannosaurus rex and related carnivorous dinosaurs likely had lips covering their teeth, based on comparisons with modern birds and reptiles and studies of dinosaur anatomy.
- Scientists detected low-frequency gravitational waves moving through the galaxy for the first time by measuring tiny variations in radio signals from pulsar stars.
- In the Pfizer phase 3 RSV vaccine trial, three inflammatory neurologic events were initially identified within 42 days after vaccination, all in the vaccine arm: Guillain-Barré syndrome 14 days after vaccination, Miller Fisher syndrome 10 days after vaccination, and undifferentiated motor-sensory axonal polyneuropathy 21 days after vaccination.
- Kennewick Man's teeth reportedly match a dental pattern found today in South Asia.
- Spores of sporormiella, a fungus dependent on large herbivores such as mammoths and mastodons, disappeared from Page-Ladson's sediment record around 12,600 years ago, coinciding with the disappearance of large Ice Age animals elsewhere in North America.
- A cave in Oregon produced fossilized human excrement that was identified through DNA analysis and dated using accelerator mass spectrometry, providing evidence of pre-Clovis inhabitants.
- Some ancient South American individuals whose DNA was analyzed were genetically linked to people of the Clovis culture.
- Paranthropus boisei had human-like hand proportions but its wrist lacked the highly adaptive structure found in Neanderthals and later humans, while its grasp was powerful and gorilla-like.
- Paleoanthropologist Tracy Kivell stated that the Paranthropus boisei hand has features remarkably similar to those of gorillas, and no other known hominin has hand morphology so gorilla-like.
- The 110-million-year-old Mongolian dinosaur Zavacephale was identified as the oldest pachycephalosaur yet discovered and already possessed a domed skull, 14 million years earlier than paleontologists had thought pachycephalosaurs evolved that feature.
- The megaraptor Joaquinraptor, described in 2025 from a partial skeleton in South America, had a crocodilian bone against its jaws, suggesting it may have been feeding on a crocodilian shortly before it died.
- Two 2025 studies showed dinosaur eggs can provide direct dating evidence, with one dating minerals preserved inside fossil eggshells and another analyzing radioactive isotopes preserved within the eggshell itself.
- Fossilized skin from a juvenile Diplodocus discovered at Montana's Mother's Day Quarry preserved melanosomes revealing that its scales had conspicuous patterns rather than being uniformly gray or brown.
- The track sizes and shapes from the Poland site indicate flat-bodied, lizard-like creatures up to 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long with stout legs.
- The 395-million-year-old tetrapod tracks are 10 million years older than the oldest known fossils of elpistostegids, lobe-finned fishes considered transitional forms between fish and tetrapods.
- The Polish tetrapod footprints indicate that four-limbed, digit-bearing vertebrates were walking nearly 20 million years earlier than previously thought based on the fossil record.
- Fossil footprints discovered in southeastern Poland are 395 million years old, making them the oldest known tetrapod tracks and the oldest evidence of true tetrapods.
- Two small, spiky dinosaurs previously identified as separate species Dracorex and Stygimoloch have been suggested to actually be juvenile Pachycephalosaurus individuals.
- Microscopic analysis of Zavacephale rinpoche's limb bones showed it was immature and still growing when it died, despite already having a fully domed skull.
- Firestone, Kennett, West, and colleagues argued in a 2007 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Earth experienced an extraterrestrial impact around 12,900 years ago at the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial.
- During food competition experiments, male bonobos' cortisol levels increased when a dominant partner was expected to monopolize food and decreased when food was expected to be shared, whereas male chimpanzees showed changes in testosterone instead.
- Bonobos show no significant increase in testosterone levels between infancy and adulthood, while male chimpanzees show a significant age-related testosterone increase (slope = 0.033, r = 0.524, p < 0.001, n = 70).
- During the 2024–25 influenza season, at least 280 children died in the U.S., the highest non-pandemic pediatric flu death count since the CDC began tracking in 2004, while pediatric flu vaccination rates fell to 50.2%, their lowest level in about 15 seasons.
- In 2011, physical oceanographer Bob Pickart and Icelandic scientists detected a previously unknown current flowing in the opposite direction from the water they were studying in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland.
- Scientists discovered microbial life in Antarctica's Blood Falls.
- Physicists discovered in 2013 the world's first naturally occurring topological insulator, which can be mined from the earth's crust.
- A 2004 study published in Science demonstrated that neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) can kill bacteria.
- A study by Scandinavian scientists found that culling prey fish populations can be an effective strategy for helping restore threatened predator fish stocks.
- In 1727, German anatomy professor Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts was caused by light rather than heat, recording words on the salts with sunlight, though he did not preserve the images permanently.
- Chinese philosopher Mozi described the pinhole-camera principle in the 5th century BCE, explaining that light passing through a pinhole into a dark room projects an inverted image onto the opposite wall.
- Between 1980 and 2000, relative fat consumption in the United States declined while obesity and diabetes rates increased.
- The Cahuilla earthquake swarm's earthquakes initially began about five miles underground after fluid entered a fault system and altered pressure within the rocks.
- The Cahuilla earthquake swarm began in 2016 but went unnoticed until 2017, when a citizen emailed the Southern California Seismic Network about a cluster of tiny earthquakes.
- Researchers identified 22,698 earthquakes in the Cahuilla swarm in Southern California, which lasted nearly four years.
- In a two-year Duke University study, participants assigned to reduce calories by 25% achieved an average reduction of 12%, and their biological age increased by 0.11 years per year, compared with 0.71 years per year among people eating their usual diets.
- In rhesus monkey studies, calorie restriction benefited older monkeys but not younger ones, contrasting with mouse studies where beginning calorie restriction at a young age produced the best results.
- The reduction in amyloid deposits from estrogen skin patch use was most apparent among women carrying the APOE e4 genotype, a genetic variant associated with greater risk of late-onset Alzheimer's disease.
- Women who received estrogen through a skin patch had lower brain amyloid deposition than women who received a placebo, while oral estrogen was not associated with lower amyloid deposition.
- NASA's Operation IceBridge radar and laser surveys in 2015 revealed a bowl-shaped depression in the bedrock beneath Greenland's Hiawatha Glacier.
- Ben Garrod, co-presenter of the BBC special 'The Day the Dinosaurs Died,' stated that the dinosaurs' extinction depended on where the asteroid hit, rather than the asteroid's size, the scale of the blast, or its global reach.
- The sulfur cloud from the asteroid impact blocked out the Sun and caused a 'global winter' that lasted more than a decade.
- The Gulf of Mexico's shallower waters at the impact site produced a dense cloud containing as much as 100 billion tons of vaporized sulfur.
- The absolute value of price changes in the U.S. fluctuated between 6 and 8 percent before 2020 and mostly between 7 and 8 percent after 2020, despite inflation's sharp rise in 2021-2022.
- Because of CPI index rounding, the smallest possible change in the late-1950s index translated into an approximately 4-percentage-point swing in annualized 1-month inflation, while by the early 1980s the equivalent effect was roughly one-third as large.
- U.S. inflation volatility in the 1990s and early 2000s was not much different from its level in the 1960s; the decline relative to the 1960s occurred only at quarterly and monthly frequencies.
- Wastewater pumped into deep disposal wells can trigger earthquakes, as documented in Oklahoma, Texas, and Ohio.
- The USGS estimate of 143 million Americans at earthquake risk is almost twice the 75 million cited in a similar 2006 study.
- The median number of individuals required for recovery under U.S. Endangered Species Act recovery plans is 2,400, exceeding species' abundances at the time of listing for 93% of species.
- The median number of populations required for delisting under the U.S. Endangered Species Act is at or below historical population numbers for 64% of species.
- Well-recorded earthquakes up to magnitude 6.6 on shallow continental creeping faults produce fault-surface rupture areas similar to those of locked faults with the same magnitude.
- The 1995 American Institute for Research evaluation concluded that some remote-viewing results were accurate enough to defy randomness, but the phenomenon was too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes.
- At a 2009 FDA advisory-panel meeting, members voted 36-1 to recommend that children's acetaminophen products be made in a single concentration, but the FDA never made that requirement mandatory.
- Italian researchers released 150,000 baby octopuses into the Adriatic Sea as an effort to fight invasive crabs.
- A European fertility group has called for an international cap on sperm-donor contributions after some donor-conceived people discovered they have hundreds of biological siblings.
- The newly discovered interneuron accounts for approximately one-third of all interneurons in the primate striatum.