There will be 896 million domestic tourists travelling during this year's Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, an increase of 86 percent compared to last year, China Ministry of Culture and Tourism estimated on Saturday. Revenue from domestic tourism revenue is expected to reach 782.5 billion yuan ($107.3 billion), a growth of 138 percent compared […]
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) unveiled the crew of upcoming Shenzhou-16 manned spaceflight mission on Monday. Veteran taikonaut Jing Haipeng, who will visit space for the fourth time during the mission set to be launched on Tuesday at 9:31 am, will serve as the mission commander and lead two fresh faces from the third […]
An ancient snakeskin preserves the bright green coloration of its wearer, researchers report March 31 in Current Biology. In the early 20th century, miners discovered the fossilized remains of an 11.2-million- to 8.7-million-year-old snake in northeastern Spain. Modern researchers have managed to reconstruct the snake’s coloration, thanks to the presence of skeletons of the animal’s […]
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Cities have become great unintentional experiments in evolution. Urban life can alter the basic biological traits of its plant and animal residents, down to the taste of leaves or the stickiness of toes, researchers reported at the 2016 Evolution conference. For white clover (Trifolium repens), leaf taste matters as a defense against […]
ORLANDO, FLA. — What some people view as a flaw in a new genetic-engineering tool might actually be a safety feature, a study suggests. CRISPR/Cas9 gene drives, as the new tools are called, are molecular cut-and-paste machines that can break regular rules of inheritance and get passed to more than 50 percent of offspring (SN: […]
Instead of destroying its leafy hosts, one common plant virus takes a more backhanded approach to domination. It makes infected plants more attractive to pollinators, ensuring itself a continued supply of virus-susceptible plant hosts for generations to come. The strategy might be a way for the virus to discourage resistance from building up in the […]
Unseasonable shrinking of sea ice could trigger another peril of climate change: increasing ice-overs on land that starve reindeer and threaten Siberian herders’ way of life. The worst of these events in the memory of Nenets herders on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula killed 61,000 of 275,000 reindeer in 2013, a blow to the herders’ livelihood that […]
Living on the bottom rungs of the social ladder may be enough to make you sick. A new study manipulating the pecking order of monkeys finds that low social status kicks the immune system into high gear, leading to unwanted inflammation akin to that in people with chronic diseases. The new study, in the Nov. […]
Pregnancy changes nearly everything about an expectant mother’s life. That includes her brain. Pregnancy selectively shrinks gray matter to make a mom’s brain more responsive to her baby, and those changes last for years, scientists report online December 19 in Nature Neuroscience. “This study, coupled with others, suggests that a woman’s reproductive history can have […]
It seems logical to expect cold water to freeze faster than hot, but some experiments have suggested the opposite. There’s now a new explanation for why hot water might freeze faster than cold under certain conditions. The phenomenon, known as the Mpemba effect, may be due to the properties of the bonds that link up […]