Articles

  • 1 week ago | science.org | Michael Price

    For more than a century, scientists thought leprosy was an Old World disease with a single culprit. The bacterium Mycobacterium leprae had ravaged Europe, Asia, and Africa for thousands of years and was introduced to the Americas by European colonists and enslaved people from Africa about 500 years ago. But in 2008, researchers discovered a second species, M. lepromatosis, circulating in Mexico. Whether that, too, had arrived with Europeans or was native to the Americas was unclear.

  • 1 month ago | science.org | Michael Price

    In 2008, Kun-Yu Tsai was shopping for antiques in southern Taiwan’s Tainan City when an unusual relic caught his eye: a brownish jawbone with blackened, thickset teeth that fishermen had dredged up from the nearby Penghu Channel. An amateur fossil hunter, Kun-Yu recognized the mysterious jawbone as human—but noticed it was distinct from modern mandibles. Intrigued, he bought the fossil and later donated it to Taiwan’s National Museum of Natural Science.

  • Jan 9, 2025 | science.org | Michael Price

    Last month, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), one of the premier journals covering paleoanthropology, resigned en masse in a dispute with its publisher, the for-profit behemoth Elsevier. Their objections included a lack of adequate copyediting support and open-access fees too high for many authors to afford.

  • Oct 23, 2024 | arxiv.org | Michael Price |Colm Prendergast |Lauren Mentzer |Berk Iskender

    Open access is only possible with YOUR support. Give to arXiv this week to help keep science open for all.

  • Oct 17, 2024 | science.org | Michael Price

    If a fresh chewy baguette or a sweet roasted yam gives you a burst of energy, you can thank a chance genetic mutation that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago in our ancestors. That’s just one takeaway from a pair of studies—one published last month in Nature, the other out today in Science—that trace the evolutionary history of the gene that helps break down starch into sugars in our mouths. Most modern humans carry multiple copies of this salivary amylase gene, called AMY1.

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