Beer breweries’ trash may have been Danish painters’ treasure. The base layer of several paintings created in Denmark in the mid-1800s contains remnants of cereal grains and brewer’s yeast, the latter being a common by-product of the beer brewing process, researchers report May 24 in Science Advances. The finding hints that artists may have used the leftovers to prime their canvases.   Records suggest that Danish house painters sometimes created glossy, decorative paint by adding beer, says Cecil Krarup Andersen, a conservator at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. But yeast and cerea ..read more

Heating an insecticide can give it new life. Microwaving the insecticide deltamethrin rearranges its crystal structure but doesn’t change its chemical composition. The rearrangement renews deltamethrin’s ability to kill mosquitoes that have become resistant to the insecticide, researchers report April 21 in Malaria Journal. The researchers didn’t set out to revive insecticides, says Bart Kahr, a crystallographer at New York University. He and colleagues had been working on crystal growth experiments. “And it turns out that a very good crystal for the experiment that we wanted to do was DDT, th ..read more

Death cap mushrooms get their name for a reason: The poisonous fungi can kill if ingested in even small amounts. But researchers may have found an antidote for one of the mushroom’s most deadly toxins. A dye already used in medical procedures can block damage from the mushroom’s alpha-amanitin toxin, researchers report May 16 in Nature Communications. The work was done with human cells grown in lab dishes and with mice. If the finding holds up in trials with people, the antidote has potential to save lives. Death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) are responsible for the majority of deaths fro ..read more

The adage “all attention is good attention” may be true for marketers — not so for the Sonoran Desert toad. Last fall, the U.S. National Park Service sent out a message on Facebook asking visitors to “refrain from licking” the toad (technically Incilius alvarius but commonly called Bufo alvarius). That message came months after a New York Times article covered the booming interest in the psychedelic compound that the toad excretes from its skin — along with the “poaching, over-harvesting and illegal trafficking” that have accompanied that interest. People don’t typically lick the toads to get ..read more

Millions of years ago, giant volcanic eruptions in what’s now Turkey and Peru each deposited millions of metric tons of nitrate on the surrounding land. That nutrient may have come from volcanic lightning, researchers reported April 24 at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. The discovery adds evidence to the idea that, early in Earth’s history, volcanoes could have provided some of the materials that made it possible for life to emerge, says volcanologist Erwan Martin of Sorbonne University in Paris. Nitrogen is an essential ingredient in biological molecules, such as protei ..read more

Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the structure of DNA may have been different than previously believed. Franklin wasn’t the victim of data theft at the hands of James Watson and Francis Crick, say biographers of the famous duo. Instead, she collaborated and shared data with Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Seventy years ago, a trio of scientific papers announcing the discovery of DNA’s double helix was published. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for the finding. Franklin, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, died of ovarian cancer b ..read more

In August 2021 on a lonely crater floor, the newest Mars rover dug into one of its first rocks. The percussive drill attached to the arm of the Perseverance rover scraped the dust and top several millimeters off a rocky outcrop in a 5-centimeter-wide circle. From just above, one of the rover’s cameras captured what looked like broken shards wedged against one another. The presence of interlocking crystal textures became obvious. Those textures were not what most of the scientists who had spent years preparing for the mission expected. Then the scientists watched on a video conference as the ro ..read more

Ice cubes float in water because they’re less dense than the liquid. But a newfound type of ice has a density nearly equal to what’s in your water glass, researchers report in the Feb. 3 Science. If you could plop this ice in your cup without it melting immediately, it would bob around, neither floating nor sinking. The new ice is a special type called an amorphous ice. That means the water molecules within it aren’t arranged in a neat pattern, as in normal, crystalline ice. Other types of amorphous ice are already known, but they have densities either lower or higher than water’s density unde ..read more

Scientists have unwrapped long-sought details of embalming practices that ancient Egyptians used to preserve dead bodies. Clues came from analyses of chemical residue inside vessels from the only known Egyptian embalming workshop and nearby burial chambers. Mummification specialists who worked there concocted specific mixtures to embalm the head, wash the body, treat the liver and stomach, and prepare bandages that swathed the body, researchers report February 1 in Nature. “Ancient Egyptian embalmers had extensive chemical knowledge and knew what substances to put on the skin to preserve it, e ..read more

In Appalachia’s coal country, researchers envision turning toxic waste into treasure. The pollution left behind by abandoned mines is an untapped source of rare earth elements. Rare earths are a valuable set of 17 elements needed to make everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to fluorescent bulbs and lasers. With global demand skyrocketing and China having a near-monopoly on rare earth production — the United States has only one active mine — there’s a lot of interest in finding alternative sources, such as ramping up recycling. Pulling rare earths from coal waste offers a two-for-o ..read more