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In Aşıklı Höyük, a Stone-Age town in the highlands of central Turkey, a team of archaeologists, writing in the journal PNAS earlier this week, have pieced together what that process looked like for sheep and goats, some of the earliest herded livestock. The village, one of many experimenting with raising animals, contains 1,000 years of bones, dung, and settlement all in the same place, allowing archaeologists to assemble a time-lapse of domestication....

Seven named storms have been observed so far this season, including Hurricane Fay, which became the first storm in recorded history to make landfall in Florida four times, and Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Cuba on August 30, and as a Category 3 storm in Louisiana on September 1. Because the team’s predictions are based on statistical models that use historical data from the past 60 years, Gray reminded residents that the forecasts indicate what this year’s hurricane activity is likely to be if the global atmosphere and ocean behave in the next few months as they have over the last 60 years....

The leopard seal and a whole host of other large marine predators are drawn to the Southern Ocean to hunt. Whether directly or indirectly, what supports these animals is krill, small but superabundant crustaceans related to prawns. In fact, there are something like 85 different species of krill spread across all the world’s oceans. But the one that most people think of when they hear the word is the Antarctic krill....

The glass floor is surrounded by infrared LEDs covered with pressure-sensitive film. Below the glass floor is a camera and projector. When someone steps down on the film, it stops the infrared beams. The camera notices that, and the projector can beam up an image (or move a soccer ball) in response. Presto: quality time with your mirror self. New Scientist

F.lux changes the colors of your screen depending on the time of day. Most screens are calibrated for use during the day–offering a bluish tint to match the morning hours. To compensate, f.lux tints your phone or computer screen with warmer colors to when it’s dark out. This is especially easy on the eyes when you’re working late or have your phone in your face in bed. The app is available for PCs, Macs, and Linux....

The trouble with alcohol is that it’s everywhere. We don’t treat any other drug the way we treat alcohol, marijuana included, and in part that’s because we mostly don’t think of it as a drug. It’s what you down a shot of to loosen up on the dance floor, or to ease your social anxieties at your company’s holiday party. You know it’s not good for you, sure, but it’s a part of daily life....

A few hardworking filmmakers from indie film company Sunchaser Pictures trekked out to Death Valley’s remote Eureka Dunes during the Geminid Meteor Shower peak in mid-December, and the result is some truly wonderous starporn. The 3-minute timelapse (shot with two DSLRs and complete with Moby soundtrack) condenses every 50 minutes into every 5 seconds of video. It captures a pretty stunning view of the rotation of the night sky, absent the usual pest of light pollution....

For the first time, a study has documented the strange scratching behavior of aquatic relief-seekers in the open ocean. In a study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, Chris Thompson, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia caught the interesting actions all by chance. “This study came about through a chance observation. We use baited camera systems around the world to study the status and ecology of pelagic (offshore/blue water) wildlife....

Why is it so hard to kick the ball? Because your eyes perceive the image of the ball to be in a different location than it actually is. Binoculars are basically two telescopes mounted side by side. Each barrel in a pair of binoculars has two lenses — an objective lens (the one closest to the object being viewed), and a second lens called the eyepiece. Binoculars magnify relatively distant objects....

Here’s what else you need to know this week. Kids are catching and spreading the virus, often just as much as adults. In the early days of the pandemic, the role children played in spreading and catching COVID-19 was mysterious. It seemed like kids weren’t getting as sick as older folks, and an early belief that children weren’t likely to catch or transmit the disease has contributed to arguments that schools should reopen come fall....

Download the latest episode of the podcast! Snap made new Spectacles Last year, Snap—the company that brought you SnapChat and a dancing hot dog that was everywhere for part of 2017—widely released its first hardware product, Spectacles. The face-mounted camera funneled content directly into SnapChat, but consumers reportedly didn’t exactly buy them by the truckload. Last week, however, Snap introduced Spectacles 2. They’re slimmer, ditch the yellow circles at the corners of the lenses, and capture HD footage by default, rather than SD like the previous model....

The bill was announced on Thursday by its co-sponsors: Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Its intention is to outlaw certain behaviors that lawmakers consider to be anticompetitive. “As dominant digital platforms – some of the biggest companies our world has ever seen – increasingly give preference to their own products and services, we must put policies in place to ensure small businesses and entrepreneurs still have the opportunity to succeed in the digital marketplace,” Klobuchar said in a statement....

Maggie is one of thousands of children who develop cancer and, through rigorous treatment and holistic care by doctors and families, beat the disease. Treatment for cancer has increased dramatically since the 1950s, and nowhere is that more evident than in pediatric oncology; of the thousands of children treated in the U.S. for cancer every year, 80 percent of them will go into remission and go on to live productive lives—significantly higher than the five-year survival numbers for general oncology, which are 63 percent chance of survival for female patients and 66 percent for men....

Lefties are an oddity among humans. Only about 1 in 9 of us use that hand, but my research on primates has found that in bonobos and chimps, the split is more even: About 1 in 3 default left. For orangutans, 2 in 3 individuals are left-handed. When I first started working with chimp colonies, I was mostly recording the mitts they used for tools. But some of them, perhaps out of frustration, would aggressively hurl poop at me....

“The declines in life expectancy since 2019 are largely driven by the pandemic,” the CDC stated in a news release. “COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74 percent, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50 percent of the decline from 2020 to 2021.” The CDC also pointed to overdoses and accidental injury deaths as a major factor. One of the most dramatic drops in life expectancy was among Alaskan Native and American Indian populations....

Those apps include Instagram and WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired in, respectively, 2012 and 2014. Quitting all three services will release your data and social media activities from Facebook’s clutches. Of course, ditching all of these apps will leave a hole in your social, photo-sharing, and chatting routines. So we rounded up a few alternatives that do pretty much the same thing. Just bear in mind that no app can perfectly replace all the features of Facebook and Instagram—if you want all their benefits, you’ll have to keep using them, which means accepting that the tech company will continue vacuuming up information about your interests and activities....

There’s nothing more painful than watching the time pass. Instead, occupy your mind with these logic problems. Then whip them out on video chats and socially-distant hangs, and watch your friends scratch their heads. Answers are below each question, but don’t cheat! Time Trials Q: A kindergartner, a fifth grader, a high school track star, and an Olympic sprinter are all waiting in line at a track-and-field meet’s food stand....

Microorganisms surround us. In the relatively desolate atmosphere at 1,000 feet, every cubic meter of air contains about a thousand microbes. Closer to the ground, that number skyrockets to 100,000, and on every square centimeter of human skin, it jumps to 10 million. A teaspoon of dirt contains 50 billion microbes, more than seven times the number of people on Earth. Yet despite such abundance, scientists know little about the microbial ecosystem....

One of the fully-autonomous rovers captured the image above as it hopped across the surface soon after landing. You can see Ryugu to the left, and a reflection of the sun—that bright spot to the right. If it looks a little blurry, that’s because the rover was in motion when it snapped the magnificent pic. The gravity on Ryugu is so faint that engineers had to get very creative when thinking of ways to move the rovers around the surface....

The ability to compare vertebrate skeletons in excruciating detail is important for anatomists and taxonomists who need to note minuscule differences for their research. Traditionally they’ve gone about this work by “staining” the bones with dyes, and “clearing” out most of the muscle tissue by dissolving it with a digestive enzyme. You wind up with a colorful but floppy specimen with see-through skin—ready for its close-up. The new methods supercharge that process by creating the option to pose the creature....