Scared of the dentist? Be glad you don’t live in the Ice Age. A pair of 13,000-year-old front teeth found in Italy contain the earliest known use of fillings – made out of bitumen. The teeth, two upper central incisors belonging to one person, were discovered at the Riparo Fredian site near Lucca in northern […]
history
Feral Hogs Root Through History
Archaeological sites inside Florida Air Force bases are threatened by foraging pigs. Feral swine, first introduced by some of the earliest European explorers to America, have been roaming Florida for the past 500 years, and are now present in at least 35 states. The invasive pigs are well-known as a destructive environmental menace, tearing up […]
Canada used hungry indigenous children to study malnutrition
Ire follows article detailing tests on unwitting aboriginal citizens in the 1940s and 1950s. Canadian government scientists used malnourished native populations as unwitting subjects in experiments conducted in the 1940s and 1950s to test nutritional interventions. The tests, many of which involved children at state-funded residential schools, had been largely forgotten until they were described […]
Slow science
The world’s longest-running experiments remind us that science is a marathon, not a sprint. Although science is a long-term pursuit, research is often practised over short timescales: a discrete experiment or a self-contained project constrained by the length of a funding cycle. But some investigations cannot be rushed. To study human lifespans or the roiling […]
On the record
The open science movement is just the latest development in the long history of scholarly communication. The essence of science has always been communication. Nothing gets entered into the scientific record until it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal so that it can be explained to the scientific community at large, allowing them to […]