60-second Science

The volatile compounds released by microbial communities on cheese rinds shape and shift a cheese’s microbiome. Christopher Intagliata reports. 

The mass-extinction asteroid happened to strike an area where the rock contained a lot of organic matter and sent soot into the stratosphere, where it could block sunlight for years.

Planners returned water to the dry bed of Arizona’s Santa Cruz River in 2019, and various species began showing up on the same day.

Researchers say three ancient leather balls, dug up from the tombs of horsemen in northwestern China, are the oldest such specimens from Europe or Asia. Christopher Intagliata reports.

From mammals to mollusks, animals living among humans lose their antipredator behaviors.

The ancestors of today’s dogs already exhibited some playfulness, which became a key trait during domestication.

A stretch of Neandertal DNA has been associated with some cases of severe COVID-19, but it’s unclear how much of a risk it poses. Christopher Intagliata reports. 

New Nobel laureate in chemistry Jennifer Doudna talks about various applications of the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

Blue whales off California’s coast sing at night—until it’s time to start migrating, and they switch to daytime song.

Charles Rice, who today shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, talked about how rapidly research now occurs, compared with his early work.

Researchers determined that Greenland is on track to lose more ice this century than during any of the previous 120 centuries. Christopher Intagliata reports.

The disappearance of their predators in a disturbed ecosystem has turned Atlantic forest sloths from night creatures to day adventurers.

Researchers seeking evidence for cancer in dinosaurs found it in a collection of bones at a paleontology museum in Alberta.

Fork-tailed flycatchers make a fluttering sound with their wings—but separate subspecies have different “dialects” of fluttering. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Here are some brief reports about science and technology from all over, including one from Israel about what DNA reveals about the Dead Sea Scrolls’ parchment. 

Hyraxes, which live in Africa and the Middle East, punctuate their songs with snorts. And the snorts appear to reflect the animals’ emotional state. Jason G. Goldman reports.

Scientists determined that temperatures were 11 degrees cooler during the last ice age—and that finding has implications for modern-day warming. Julia Rosen reports. 

Hummingbirds in the Peruvian Andes enter a state of torpor at night to conserve energy, dipping their body temperature to as low as 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Christopher Intagliata reports. 

Given an impossible task, a dog will ask a human for help, but a wolf will not seek help—and neither will a pet pig.

Pumping cheap iron-oxide-rich red bricks with specific vapors that form polymers enables the bricks to become electrical-charge-storage devices.