Honeybee remains found in a 3,000-year-old apiary have given archaeologists a one-of-a-kind window into the beekeeping practices of the ancient world. “Beekeeping is known only from a few Egyptian sources, from a few tombs and paintings. No actual hives have been found,” said Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist Amihai Mazar. The hives were uncovered in 2007 at an excavation in Tel Rehov,... 

The Cassini spacecraft made its deepest dip ever into the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, at 8:28 p.m. Eastern time on June 20. The data it collected will help determine whether the moon has its own magnetic field. “For Titan scientists, this is one of the most anticipated flybys of the whole mission,” wrote space physicist Cesar Bertucci of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics... 

To watch the uncanny synchronization of a starling flock in flight is to wonder if the birds aren’t actually a single entity, governed by something beyond the usual rules of biology. New research suggests that’s true. Mathematical analysis of flock dynamics show how each starling’s movement is influenced by every other starling, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter how large a flock is, or if... 

BOULDER, Colorado — Oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon site in the Gulf of Mexico will reach the Atlantic Ocean within six months, says oceanographer Synte Peacock. Exactly when is all down to an eddy that broke off of the infamous Loop Current southwest of Florida on June 12. sciencenewsPeacock, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, usually studies how the ocean’s... 

A 3.6 million-year-old fossil from one of humanity’s earliest ancestors is more human-like than expected — and much taller. The discovery makes Lucy, the best-known fossil of all, appear to be exceptionally short by comparison. Lucy and the new skeleton are both Australopithecus afarensis, the first fully bipedal primate and a direct ancestor of humanity. Unlike Lucy and every other A. afarensis... 

While the oil disaster’s terrible toll on birds and turtles will at least be measured, less charismatic creatures tend to be ignored. That’s why conservationists are organizing a citizen science project to count the Gulf Coast’s ghost crabs. Also known as sand crabs, they’re not classically cute, but they’re an important part of coastal food webs. Because the crabs are relatively easy to... 

Giant planets with wonky orbits mostly circle blistering-hot stars, two new studies find. This pattern could explain why some “hot Jupiters” — planets from a third to 12 times the mass of Jupiter that sit scorchingly close to their stars — orbit the way their star spins, while others tilt so far that they orbit backward. “It’s a possible resolution of what would otherwise be a weird fluke,”... 

Wear patterns on ancient antelope teeth have allowed researchers to reconstruct Europe’s environment 8 million years ago, when the continent’s great apes vanished. One of those ape species could have given rise to the human lineage, making the circumstances of their disappearance especially interesting. “Some kind of homogeneity happened around that time,” said anthropologist Gildas Merceron... 

New fossils have provided a snapshot of proto-human diets during a critical evolutionary moment, when better fare helped our small-brained ancestors boost their cognitive capacity. Two-million-year-old bones that belonged to fish, crocodiles and turtles — aquatic animals rich in brain-fueling fatty acids — were found together with stone tool fragments near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. “We know that... 

Human eyes can detect the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement — but only sometimes, a new study on the physics preprint website arXiv.org claims. While eyes can help determine if two individual photons were recently entangled, they can’t tell if the brighter bunch of photons that actually hit the retina are in this bizarre quantum state. “In general you think these quantum phenomena that... 

A landmark decision has excluded fMRI lie-detection evidence from a federal court case in Tennessee. The defense tried to use brain scans of the defendant to prove its client had not intentionally defrauded the government. In a 39-page opinion, Judge Tu Pham provided both a rebuke of this kind of fMRI evidence now, and a roadmap for how future defendants may be able to satisfy the Daubert standard,... 

Oyster shells excavated from a well in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British settlement in North America, bolster the notion that the first colonists suffered an unusually deep and long-lasting drought. sciencenewsThe shells reveal that water in the James River near the colony, where many of those oysters were harvested, was much saltier then than along that stretch of the estuary today,... 

An Alaskan bay bitterly contested by fishermen and miners has become the site of a landmark study on population dynamics — and the findings favor the fish. Published June 2 in Nature, the analysis of Bristol Bay salmon quantifies a common-sense tenet of population dynamics: Diversity produces resilience. Had the proposed Pebble Mine been built in earlier decades, it’s possible the bay’s sockeye... 

A thick haze of organic material let the early Earth soak up the sun’s warmth without absorbing harmful ultraviolet rays, according to a new study. The model offers a new twist on an old puzzle: Although the sun was so dim billions of years ago that the Earth should have been a ball of ice, the young planet had liquid oceans capable of supporting life. “Given these recent papers, we can probably... 

Elderly people who care for a spouse who has dementia are at increased risk of developing dementia themselves, a study finds. The stress of attending to a mentally incapacitated spouse may somehow contribute to the added risk, scientists report in the May Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. sciencenewsPrevious studies have shown that chronic stress leads to increased levels of the hormone... 

The Environmental Protection Agency ordered British Petroleum to change the type of dispersant the company is using to keep oil from reaching American shores. The EPA gave the company 72 hours to switch to a less toxic chemical for use in breaking up oil slicks. Persistent questions about the toxicity of Corexit 9500 have plagued BP over the last several weeks. But the company continued to purchase... 

The flashes of white light accompanying some solar flares are caused by the sun’s acceleration of electrons to speeds greater than half the speed of light. The phenomenon’s new explanation derives from data recorded from a 2006 solar flare. The presence of high-energy X-rays in the same spot that scientists saw visible light tipped them off that some kind of non-thermal process was generating... 

A new vaccine may be able to provide some protection against all strains of influenza. Current immunizations create antibodies that target a specific piece of a molecule on the surface of the virus that researchers call its “head.” That piece of the hemaglutinin protein evolves very quickly, which is why you have to get a different flu shot each year as new types of flu develop. The next-generation... 

Detailed Hubble images reveal a single supermassive black hole wandering away from its host galaxy’s center where it belongs. The misplaced black hole is probably the result of a merger between two smaller black holes, but could also have been pushed by a jet of matter extending from the galaxy’s core. Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole — millions to billions of times more massive... 

Mysterious clouds of gas hovering above the plane of the Milky Way may be the fractured remnants of superbubbles blown by stellar winds and exploding stars. “There’s a fundamental, interesting connection between gas far away from the Milky Way and the amount of star formation below it in the galactic plane,” F. Jay Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory told Wired Science in a phone...