discoveries

Read the latest news stories about recent scientific discoveries on Newser.com

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Want to Exercise Harder? Turn to Beet Juice
 Want to Exercise Harder? 
 Turn to Beet Juice 
NEW STUDY

Want to Exercise Harder? Turn to Beet Juice

Gatorade is so 2014

(Newser) - Want to exercise longer without feeling wiped out? A new study suggests adding beet juice to your diet. The research, published in the American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology , zeros in on nitrate, which is found in beet juice and converted to nitric oxide in the body;...

How Boa Constrictors Really Kill Their Prey

They cut off a prey's blood flow, which kills in minutes

(Newser) - Most people think constrictors like boas and anacondas squeeze the air out of their prey with their muscular coils. And most people are wrong, according to a new study that offers an entirely different theory. Dickinson College researcher Scott Boback explains that colleague Dave Hardy first noticed two decades ago...

Sunken Car's Remains May Solve 43-Year-Old Mystery

Car pulled from North Carolina lake likely Amos Shook's

(Newser) - An autopsy may help write the final page of a 43-year-old mystery that began with the disappearance of a military retiree in western North Carolina. The Caldwell County Sheriff's Office says human remains found Tuesday in a 1968 Pontiac recovered from a Lake Rhodhiss, 75 miles northwest of Charlotte,...

Scientists: Here's What Fat Truly Tastes Like

It's in a class all its own, dubbed oleogustus, and disgusting

(Newser) - Ponder the taste of fat for a minute. Is your mouth watering? It shouldn't be. While the closest you've probably come to eating pure fat was on an untrimmed steak, Purdue University researchers have isolated the taste of fat for the first time—and folks, it isn't...

Researchers Make 'Fantastically Exciting' Koran Discovery

2 sheets written in early Arabic are at least 1.3K years old

(Newser) - Pieces of what could be the oldest Koran known have been rediscovered in a library at the UK's University of Birmingham. Mistakenly bound with a Koran dating to the late seventh century, two sheets of the Muslim holy book had sat in a collection of 3,000 Middle Eastern...

Stranded Explorers Became More Than Cannibals

Scientists finally learn the lengths British shipmen went to survive

(Newser) - Call it cannibalism-plus. Scientists have learned that a group of British Navy shipmen stranded in the Canadian Arctic in the mid-1840s didn't just cut the flesh off their fellow crewmen's bones to survive, they also cracked those bones to suck out the marrow. Reporting in the International Journal ...

Women May Be More Vulnerable to Alzheimer's

And once trouble starts, it spreads faster than it does in men, study suggests

(Newser) - About two-thirds of the Alzheimer's patients in the US are women, and conventional wisdom has long explained away that stat with another: Women live longer. Now, though, three new studies suggests that women's brains are actually more vulnerable to the disease and other forms of dementia, reports NPR...

Inside the Mystery of Alexander the Great's Dad

New study claims his dad wasn't buried where researchers thought

(Newser) - The bad news: The ancient tomb at Vergina believed to house Alexander the Great's father may in fact be the final resting place of someone else. The good news: King Philip II's tomb is just a few doors down, according to a new study—though not everyone is...

Gamers Who Harass Women Actually Suck
 Gamers Who 
 Harass Women 
 Actually Suck 
NEW STUDY

Gamers Who Harass Women Actually Suck

Poor-performing males who stand to lose status take it out on ladies: study

(Newser) - Like low-status Neanderthals, contemporary men who aren't exactly winners—literally, when it comes to playing video games—are more likely to harass women online, new research cited in the Washington Post finds. Scientists who conducted the study published in Plos One played 163 games of Halo as either male-voiced...

There&#39;s Science Behind the &#39;Dad Bod&#39;
 There's Science 
 Behind the 
 'Dad Bod' 
NEW STUDY

There's Science Behind the 'Dad Bod'

First-time fathers gain between 3.3 to 4.4 pounds on average: study

(Newser) - There's science behind the plump dad bod: A new study that tracked the weight of 10,000 males over 20 years from adolescence into their early 30s finds the average 6-foot tall, first-time father gains 4.4 pounds if he lives with his child after birth and about 3....

Study: Women Don't Really Care About Guys' Penis Size

Out of 8 characteristics, penis length, girth matter little to most women

(Newser) - In a study ostensibly about whether women care if penises have been surgically repaired to treat distal hypospadias (when the urethra's opening is on the underside of the penis), scientists learned which characteristics of male genitalia matter most to a woman. Reporting in the Journal of Sexual Medicine under...

Scroll So Charred It Looks Like Charcoal Finally Read

1.5K-year-old scroll sat unreadable since being found in 1970

(Newser) - When a 1,500-year-old scroll was found in the ashes of an ancient synagogue on the shores of the Dead Sea just south of Jerusalem in 1970, it was so charred it resembled a piece of charcoal and was impossible to read or preserve. But now, thanks to the latest...

Study: 'Poorly Understood' Hemp Is Not Marijuana

But it took more than 12 years to find the gene that distinguishes them

(Newser) - Note to legislators: Hemp is not weed. So say scientists at the University of Minnesota who, reporting last week in the journal New Phytologist , have discovered a single gene that distinguishes the hemp plant from its psychoactive cannabinoid cousin marijuana. They say it took 12 years to single out the...

Experts Track 1st Black Male Slave Freed by Lincoln

William Henry Costley apparently died in a Minnesota psychiatric hospital

(Newser) - Abraham Lincoln helped free a black male slave long before the Civil War, and researchers say they've found the man's grave—in a former psychiatric hospital's cemetery, the AP reports. A budding lawyer, Lincoln won a case before the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841 that released Nance...

'Mystery Shipwreck' Spotted Off US Coast

Scientists stumble on wreck in deep Atlantic waters

(Newser) - A newly discovered shipwreck off the North Carolina coast may show first-hand how Americans conducted business before the Civil War, the Washington Post reports. Marine scientists who stumbled on the find say it includes glass bottles, red bricks, ship timbers, a metal compass, an unglazed pottery jug, and an iron...

Best Age to Wed? Study Jabs Conventional Wisdom

Chance of divorce starts rising again in 30s

(Newser) - A standard line of advice about marriage these days is not to wed too young—and divorce stats about people getting hitched before age 20 back that up. But a new study out of the University of Utah adds a surprising twist: Don't wait too long, because the risk...

Eva Peron&#39;s Lobotomy May Have Prevented a Civil War
 Eva Peron's 
 Lobotomy May 
 Have Prevented 
 a Civil War 
in case you missed it

Eva Peron's Lobotomy May Have Prevented a Civil War

Neurosurgeon claims Juan Peron ordered operation to 'calm' Evita

(Newser) - The Yale neurosurgeon who four years ago claimed former first lady of Argentina, Eva Peron, had a lobotomy in 1952 to ease her pain from cervical cancer is revising his theory. In a new paper in Neurosurgical Focus , Daniel Nijensohn says the woman who inspired the musical Evita didn't...

5 Most Incredible Discoveries of the Week

Including bone-healing marijuana and new categories for drunks

(Newser) - In addition to surprises about Pluto , stories about ancient sperm and ancient dentists make the list of the week's discoveries:
  • Oldest Animal Sperm Found : Scientists exploring an Antarctic island stumbled across history—the world's oldest animal sperm. They found it inside a fossilized cocoon made by some type
...

Tooth Reveals Earliest Known Visit to Dentist

About 14K years ago in Italy

(Newser) - Prehistoric man got cavities, too, and just like us, they had to go to the dentist. Researchers studying a 14,000-year-old infected molar say someone tried to clean it with flint tools—a discovery that amounts to the first known evidence of dentistry, reports Atlas Obscura . The patient was a...

Firstborns Have Higher IQs &mdash;but There&#39;s a Catch
Firstborns Have Higher IQs
—but There's a Catch
NEW STUDY

Firstborns Have Higher IQs —but There's a Catch

It's a difference of just one IQ point on average: study

(Newser) - Firstborns, get ready to throw this in your siblings' faces: A massive study of 377,000 high school students—the "biggest in history looking at birth order and personality," author Brent Roberts says—shows those born first tend to have higher IQs and different personality traits compared to...

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