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If you’re a museum aficionado itching for a new place to explore, 2023 has you covered. New science museums and exhibitions are opening, and some zoos are expanding. This sampling of destinations to check out in the new year or beyond has something for everyone, whether you’re a wildlife lover, space nerd or history buff. Grand Egyptian Museum Outside Cairo Opens: To be announced 2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb ( SN: 11/19/22, p. 14 ). Now, thousands of artifacts from the tomb — along with tens of thousands of other archaeological finds from ancient Egypt — will go on display when this museum, located within view of the Pyramids of Giza, opens. More than a decade in the making, it will be one of the largest archaeological museums in the world. Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation American Museum of Natural History New York City Opens: February 17 This multistory building will add tons of new exhibit space to the m...

A mysterious new disease may be to blame for severe, unexplained inflammation in older men. Now, researchers have their first good look at who the disease strikes, and how often. VEXAS syndrome, an illness discovered just two years ago, affects nearly 1 in 4,000 men over 50 years old , scientists estimate January 24 in JAMA . The disease also occurs in older women, though less frequently. Altogether, more than 15,000 people in the United States may be suffering from the syndrome, says study coauthor David Beck, a clinical geneticist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. Those numbers indicate that physicians should be on the lookout for VEXAS, Beck says. “It’s underrecognized and underdiagnosed. A lot of physicians aren’t yet aware of it.” Beck’s team reported discovering VEXAS syndrome in 2020, linking mutations in a gene called UBA1 to a suite of symptoms including fever, low blood cell count and inflammation. His team’s new study is the first to estimate how often VEXAS occurs ...

For nearly 650 years, the fortress walls in the Chinese city of Xi’an have served as a formidable barrier around the central city. At 12 meters high and up to 18 meters thick, they are impervious to almost everything — except subatomic particles called muons. Now, thanks to their penetrating abilities, muons may be key to ensuring that the walls that once protected the treasures of the first Ming Dynasty — and are now a national architectural treasure in their own right — stand for centuries more. A refined detection method has provided the highest-resolution muon scans yet produced of any archaeological structure, researchers report in the Jan. 7 Journal of Applied Physics . The scans revealed interior density fluctuations as small as a meter across inside one section of the Xi’an ramparts. The fluctuations could be signs of dangerous flaws or “hidden structures archaeologically interesting for discovery and investigation,” says nuclear physicist Zhiyi Liu of Lanzhou University in ...

In shallow coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, a seagrass-scrounging cousin of the manatee is in trouble. Environmental strains like pollution and habitat loss pose a major threat to dugong ( Dugong dugon ) survival, so much so that in December, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded the species’ extinction risk status to vulnerable. Some populations are now classified as endangered or critically endangered. If that weren’t bad enough, the sea cows are at risk of losing the protection of a group who has long looked after them: the Torres Strait Islanders. These Indigenous people off the coast of Australia historically have been stewards of the dugong populations there, sustainably hunting the animals and monitoring their numbers. But the Torres Strait Islanders are also threatened, in part because sea levels are rising and encroaching on their communities, and warmer air and sea temperatures are making it difficult for people to live in the region. ...

Prairie voles have long been heralded as models of monogamy. Now, a study suggests that the “love hormone” once thought essential for their bonding — oxytocin — might not be so necessary after all. Interest in the romantic lives of prairie voles ( Microtus ochrogaster ) was first sparked more than 40 years ago, says Devanand Manoli, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Biologists trying to capture voles to study would frequently catch two at a time, because “what they were finding were these male-female pairs,” he says. Unlike many other rodents with their myriad partners, prairie voles, it turned out, mate for life ( SN: 10/5/15 ). Pair-bonded prairie voles prefer each other’s company over a stranger’s and like to huddle together both in the wild and the lab. Because other vole species don’t have social behaviors as complex as prairie voles do, they have been a popular animal system for studying how social behavior evolves. Research over the last few decades...

In full swing The swaying feeling in jazz music that compels feet to tap may arise from near-imperceptible delays in musicians’ timing, Nikk Ogasa reported in “ Jazz gets its swing from small, subtle delays ” ( SN: 11/19/22, p. 5 ). Reader Oda Lisa , a self-described intermediate saxophonist, has noticed these subtle delays while playing.“I recorded my ‘jazzy’ version of a beloved Christmas carol, which I sent to a friend of mine,” Lisa wrote. “She praised my effort overall, but she suggested that I get a metronome because the timing wasn’t consistent. My response was that I’m a slave to the rhythm that I hear in my head. I think now I know why.” On the same page Murky definitions and measurements impede social science research, Sujata Gupta reported in “ Fuzzy definitions mar social science ” ( SN: 11/19/22, p. 10 ). Reader Linda Ferrazzara found the story thought-provoking. “If there’s no consensus on the terms people use … then there can be no productive discussion or co...

More than a century ago, scientists proved that carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere could act like a thermostat — adding more CO 2 would turn up the heat, removing it would chill the planet. But back then, most scientists thought that Earth’s climate system was far too large and stable to change quickly , that any fluctuations would happen over such a long timescale that it wouldn’t matter much to everyday life ( SN: 3/12/22, p. 16 ). Now all it takes is a look at the Weather Channel to know how wrong scientists were. Things are changing fast. Last year alone, Europe, South Asia, China, Japan and the American West endured deadly, record-breaking heat waves ( SN: 12/17/22 & 12/31/22, p. 38 ). As I write this, torrential rains are bringing death and destruction to California. And with levels of climate-warming gases continuing to increase in the atmosphere, extreme weather events will become even more frequent. Given the vastness of this threat, it’s tempting to think that any e...

Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez saw the future of energy on a broiling-hot day last September. An email alert hit her inbox from the San Diego Gas & Electric Company. “Extreme heat straining the grid,” read the message, which was also pinged as a text to 27 million people. “Save energy to help avoid power interruptions.” It worked. People cut their energy use. Demand plunged, blackouts were avoided and California successfully weathered a crisis exacerbated by climate change. “It was very exciting to see,” says Hidalgo-Gonzalez, an electrical engineer at the University of California, San Diego who studies renewable energy and the power grid. This kind of collective societal response, in which we reshape how we interact with the systems that provide us energy, will be crucial as we figure out how to live on a changing planet. Earth has warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, when the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels began belching heat-trapping gases ...

Birds that dive underwater — such as penguins, loons and grebes — may be more likely to go extinct than their nondiving kin, a new study finds. Many water birds have evolved highly specialized bodies and behaviors that facilitate diving. Now, an analysis of the evolutionary history of more than 700 water bird species shows that once a bird group gains the ability to dive, the change is irreversible. That inflexibility could help explain why diving birds have an elevated extinction rate compared with nondiving birds, researchers report in the Dec. 21 Proceedings of the Royal Society B . “There are substantial morphological adaptations for diving,” says Catherine Sheard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved with the study. For instance, birds that plunge into the water from the air, such as gannets and some pelicans, may have tweaks to the neck muscles and the bones in the chest.  It’s possible that some diving birds are evolving...

The Arctic today is a hostile place for most primates. But a series of fossils found since the 1970s suggest that wasn’t always the case. Dozens of fossilized teeth and jaw bones unearthed in northern Canada belonged to two species of early primates — or at least close relatives of primates — that lived in the Arctic around 52 million years ago, researchers report January 25 in PLOS ONE . These remains are the first primate-like fossils ever discovered in the Arctic and tell of a groundhog-sized animal that may have skittered across trees in a swamp that once existed above the Arctic Circle.   The Arctic was significantly warmer during that time. But creatures still had to adapt to extreme conditions such as long winter months without sunlight. These challenges make the presence of primate-like creatures in the Arctic “incredibly surprising,” says coauthor Chris Beard, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “No other primate or primate relative has ever been f...

Shape-shifting liquid metal robots might not be limited to science fiction anymore. Miniature machines can switch from solid to liquid and back again to squeeze into tight spaces and perform tasks like soldering a circuit board, researchers report January 25 in Matter . This phase-shifting property, which can be controlled remotely with a magnetic field, is thanks to the metal gallium. Researchers embedded the metal with magnetic particles to direct the metal’s movements with magnets . This new material could help scientists develop soft, flexible robots that can shimmy through narrow passages and be guided externally.   Scientists have been developing magnetically controlled soft robots for years. Most existing materials for these bots are made of either stretchy but solid materials, which can’t pass through the narrowest of spaces, or magnetic liquids , which are fluid but unable to carry heavy objects ( SN: 7/18/19 ). In the new study, researchers blended both approaches a...

The worst procrastinators probably won’t be able to read this story. It’ll remind them of what they’re trying to avoid, psychologist Piers Steel says. Maybe they’re dragging their feet going to the gym. Maybe they haven’t gotten around to their New Year’s resolutions. Maybe they’re waiting just one more day to study for that test. Procrastination is “putting off to later what you know you should be doing now,” even if you’ll be worse off, says Steel, of the University of Calgary in Canada. But all those tasks pushed to tomorrow seem to wedge themselves into the mind — and it may be harming people’s health. In a study of thousands of university students, scientists linked procrastination to a panoply of poor outcomes , including depression, anxiety and even disabling arm pain. “I was surprised when I saw that one,” says Fred Johansson, a clinical psychologist at Sophiahemmet University in Stockholm. His team reported the results January 4 in JAMA Network Open . The study is one of t...

SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might be our best bet in the search for habitable planets beyond our solar system. Many stars in the universe come in pairs. And lots of those should have planets orbiting them ( SN: 10/25/21 ). That means there could be many more planets orbiting around binaries than around solitary stars like ours. But until now, no one had a clear idea about whether those planets’ environments could be conducive to life. New computer simulations suggest that, in many cases, life could imitate art. Earthlike planets orbiting some configurations of binary stars can stay in stable orbits for at least a billion years , researchers reported January 11 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. That sort of stability, the researchers propose, would be enough to potentially allow life to develop, provided the planets aren’t too hot or cold. Of the planets th...

A 120-million-year-old fossil bird found in China could offer some new clues about how landbound dinosaurs evolved into today’s flying birds. The dove-sized Cratonavis zhui sported a dinosaur-like head atop a body similar to those of today’s birds , researchers report in the January Nature Ecology & Evolution . The flattened specimen came from the Jiufotang Formation, an ancient body of rock in northeastern China that is a hotbed for preserved feathered dinosaurs and archaic birds. CT scans revealed that Cratonavis had a skull that was nearly identical (albeit smaller) as those of theropod dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, paleontologist Li Zhiheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and colleagues report. This means that Cratonavis still hadn’t evolved the mobile upper jaw found in modern birds ( SN: 5/2/18 ). Researchers used CT scans to digitally reconstruct the flattened Cratonavis specimen (shown). The scans revealed that the creature had a theropod’s head a...