For over a century, the appetite of dermestid beetles—so named for their love of skin—has earned them a small but significant role in the annals of natural history. More recently, the beetles have proven forensically useful for dating, cleaning, and even identifying dead bodies. The insect’s prodigious ability to skeletonize carcasses in a quick, clean, and noncorrosive fashion has kept it the gold standard over a variety of other methods. Burying bodies or soaking them in water gets the job done but takes a long time, while using chemicals like acid or bleach can damage the quality of bones and pose health risks to researchers.

Though flesh-eating beetles make strike you as exotic, chances are you pass colonies of them every time you hop on a highway or country road. Dermestid beetles inhabit every continent except Antarctica, and they can usually be found on decaying remains. They show up to the road-kill buffet about a week after an animal’s death, following one or two waves of other insects that don’t mind eating through fur or feathers. Full Article »

Oenosaurus—meaning “wine lizard”—inhabited the earth around 150 million years ago, during the era of Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Stegosaurus. The fossil was named for the wine-producing part of Germany in which it was found, but its closest living relative is the tuatara, an unusual reptile native to New Zealand.

The only surviving member of an ancient lineage called rhynchocephalians, tuatara resemble iguanas but are not true lizards—in fact, iguanas are more closely related to snakes.

The skull of Oenosaurus, whose discovery was announced last month in the journal PLoS ONE, defies the long-standing notion of the tuatara as “a living fossil” by demonstrating impressive diversity in its evolutionary lineage.

The owners of a limestone quarry in Bavaria, Germany, found the fossil. Recognizing its significance, they donated it to a nearby paleontological research institute. Full Article »

According to a letter Hickenlooper had been given, that man was one Cyril Stanley Smith. Someone in the Atomic Energy Commission had authorized Smith, a scientist, to visit a British research center and discuss “the basic metallurgy of plutonium.” In 1948, just three years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the world, wartime fears were far from subsided. The growing Soviet Union had begun to raise its threatening head, and even allies such as Britain and the United States had only just loosened some restrictions on the exchange of scientific information. But according to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, that exchange was forbidden to include specifics about the development of American nuclear technology. Full Article »

A double-barreled method that combines blood sampling and satellite tracking offers promising help for the endangered loggerhead sea turtle.

Sea turtles spend the majority of their lives gliding along coastlines and at sea, where they forage for grasses, crustaceans, or jellyfish. The animals have been in steep decline for decades, and the difficulty of tracking their routes and foraging grounds has compromised marine conservation efforts. By tracking the turtles’ movements using blood testing and attaching satellite boxes to their shells, scientists hope to identify conservation “hotspots” where the turtles can best be protected.

This month a team in Florida published the most recent study to confirm the strength of the double-tracking approach, which they used to study seventy-one female loggerhead sea turtles on the east coast of Florida. “It’s the second most important nesting loggerhead beach in the world,” notes lead author Simona Ceriani, a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Central Florida. But “nest numbers for loggerheads have been going down since 2000,” she adds. Her team hoped to investigate their oceanic routes to find out why. Full Article »

Five thousand years ago, marauding waves of nomadic horsemen swept out of the bleak Caspian steppes across Eurasia. The Kurgans, as they’re now called, were a warring culture who imposed their leadership and language on large swathes of people. From its violent origins, their tongue would give rise to the world’s most successful language family—at least according to one theory among linguists.

Proto-Indo-European was the ancestral language that, over millennia, branched into hundreds of languages spoken by 45 percent of the world’s population, including English, Hindi, Russian, and Urdu. The location of its birth has been the subject of fiery debate for centuries.

A fascinating and contentious new study in Science supports an origins theory that couldn’t be more different from the Kurgan hypothesis. In this alternate scenario, the proto-language spread and evolved not through conquest, but rather with the gradual, peaceful expansion of agriculture out of present-day Turkey.

The research team reached this conclusion through the innovative use of computational models borrowed from evolutionary biology. Languages, like DNA, mutate at measurable rates. If you can trace the evolution of similar words across different languages, you should be able to project backwards to identify their points of divergence and ultimate origins. Full Article »

In a remote niche of the driest place on earth, archaeologists made an unlikely discovery: the remains and belongings of a 30-year-old ancient Andean man.

Chile’s high-elevation Atacama Desert is so inhospitable to life it’s been used by NASA as a stand-in for the alien landscapes of Mars. Yet, some two thousand years ago, somebody stopped there long enough to construct a stone-covered grave for a fallen traveler, who was buried with a fishhook, feathers, seeds, and two small bags. His remains don’t tell the story of his death, but they’ve given us an intimate look at his life.

The man’s hair, in particular, revealed details about the last twenty months of his life with a remarkable degree of precision. The measurements showed a prehistoric rambling man who travelled frequently between the coast and the mountainous inland region of northern Chile before his death, spending several months at a time in each location.

To reach these conclusions, a team of archaeologists led by Kelly Knudson of Arizona State University used a novel method of measuring the isotopes of various chemical elements in his bones. Isotopes are versions of the same element that occur naturally under different environmental conditions.

Molecules of a heavy isotope, such as oxygen-18, for example, are more numerous in dry, inland, and high-temperate locales, where its lower-mass isotope oxygen-16 evaporates faster. Full Article »

I was delirious with fever the first time I came face-to-face with abalone. When an autumnal spate of colds laid low half of my undergraduate dormitory, my boyfriend’s mother invited us home to escape the hotbed of infection. “I’ll cook Korean get-better food,” she said. “Abalone juk—very special.” I soon found myself staring into a ceramic bowl of a nondescript, off-white glop.

Jeonbokjuk, a hot rice porridge made with abalone flesh, may not be much to look at, but the dish scores high in nutrients, digestibility, and stick-to-your-ribs goodness. Despite juk’s humble renown as food for the sick, it was once the meal of Korean kings. The meat of the large mollusk remains prized for its delicate, briny flavor, while its striking mother-of-pearl shell has been used cross-culturally for all manner of ritual and decorative purposes. This iridescent purple, ivory, and green-hued sheen of the inner shell, called the nacre, helps protect the sea snail’s viscera. Full Article »