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Peter Daszak is fighting accusations that his work on pandemic prevention helped spark COVID-19

People often grumble that plastics are too durable. Water bottles, shopping bags, and other trash litter the planet, from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, because plastics are ubiquitous and don9t break down easily. But some plastic materials can change over time. They crack and frizzle. They "weep" out additives. They melt into sludge. All of which creates huge headaches for institutions, such as museums, trying to preserve culturally important objects. The variety of plastic objects at risk is dizzying: early radios, avant-garde sculptures, celluloid animation stills from Disney films, David Bowie costumes, the first artificial heart. Museums are doing everything they can to save culturally important items from similar fates. Over the past decade, conservators have developed better tools to identify vulnerable objects. Some conservators have also started to run experiments to shore up preservation practices and arrest decay.

In the bowels of Yale University9s Peabody Museum of Natural History lies a wickedly sharp, sickle-shaped dinosaur claw, black as coal. It is part of the type specimen of Deinonychus—the basis for the Velociraptor in the Jurassic Park movies. The black color signals something just as striking. The fossil isn9t just a mineral replica of the original claw. It is likely two-thirds dinosaur residue. That fossils can harbor organic matter isn9t new. Whole fields of science have sprung up to decipher ancient DNA and intact proteins. But in fossils as old as the Deinonychus claw, most of the useful sequences of those molecules have long vanished. Now, researchers at Yale have devised a way to extract information locked in degraded proteins. They have shown how, when conditions are right after an animal dies, cellular proteins can transform into a mix of hardy polymers that repel water, are inedible for microbes, are impervious to heat, and last for eons. They are now starting to apply their nondestructive technique to help solve paleontological mysteries such as where turtles fit on the vertebrate family tree, and whether an extinct animal was warm-blooded.

Almost 200 years ago, the renowned U.S. naturalist John James Audubon hid a decaying pig carcass under a pile of brush to test vultures9 sense of smell. When the birds overlooked the pig—while one flocked to a nearly odorless stuffed deer skin— he took it as proof that they rely on vision, not smell, to find their food. His experiment cemented a commonly held idea. Despite later evidence that vultures and a few specialized avian hunters use odors after all, the dogma that most birds aren9t attuned to smell endured. Now, that dogma is being eroded by new findings about birds9 behavior and their molecular hardware. One study showed that storks home in on the smell of freshly mown grass; another documented scores of functional olfactory receptors, in multiple bird species. Olfaction in birds is more widespread than most people have realized.

The curious and vital role of insects takes center stage in three new tomes

Neglecting native languages has repercussions for individuals and for society

A new text confronts how bias tainted efforts to preserve native cultures of the Americas

A Microsoft researcher unpacks the power and perils of today's artificial intelligence