Jennifer Ouellette 
Enlarge / Nuclear physicists used micro-XRF scanning to produce elemental maps for Roman denarii coins and their color overlays. K.V. Manukyan et al., 2019 reader comments 55 with 43 posters participating Share this story Most people associate nuclear physics with … Read more
Enlarge / Stanley Miller with the original laboratory equipment used in the 1952 Miller-Urey Experiment, which gave credence to the idea that organic molecules could have been created by the conditions of the early Earth’s atmosphere. Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images reader … Read more
reader comments 55 with 43 posters participating Share this story Once upon a time, during the Cretaceous period, a tiny crab wandered out of the water onto land and somehow got trapped in amber, which preserved it for 100 million … Read more
Enlarge / 1775 portrait of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, by Jean-Baptiste-André Gautier-Dagoty. X-ray analysis of letters between the queen and a Swedish count revealed words that had been blacked out, rendering them illegible—until now. Public domain reader comments 96 … Read more
Enlarge / Researchers tested medieval gunpowder recipes in this replica of an early 15th-century stone-throwing cannon. T.S. Ritchie et al., ACS Omega 2021 reader comments 133 with 78 posters participating Share this story Gunpowder—as opposed to modern smokeless powder—isn’t used … Read more
Enlarge / Two ants tunneling in green gel. A new Caltech study found that ants search for and remove loose grains of soil when digging their tunnels, much like humans remove loose blocks while playing Jenga. reader comments 39 with … Read more
Enlarge / A cuttlefish leisurely hanging out in a tank. A new study found that cuttlefish can remember specifics of place and time for receiving their favorite yummy food rewards. University of Cambridge reader comments 73 with 52 posters participating … Read more
Enlarge / Behold, the “Rude Man” chalk giant carved on a hill above the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, England. Barry Batchelor/PA Images/Getty Images reader comments 159 with 90 posters participating Share this story The Cerne Abbas Giant is … Read more
reader comments 37 with 33 posters participating Share this story The successful gravitational-wave detections just keep coming for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which has now confirmed two separate “mixed” mergers between black holes and neutron stars, sending powerful gravitational waves rippling … Read more
Enlarge / Spanish archaeologists recreated three common types of Paleolithic lighting systems. Medina-Alcaide et al, 2021, PLOS ONE reader comments 37 with 32 posters participating Share this story In 1993, a media studies professor at Fordham University named Edward Wachtel … Read more