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By Erin Ross Although women are publishing more studies, being cited more often, and securing more coveted first-author positions than they were in the mid 1990s, overall progress towards gender parity in science varies widely by country and field. This is according to a massive report released on March 8 that is the first to examine such …

By Hemant Mehta The ACLU may pursue litigation against the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles after they rejected Chris Bontrager‘s request for an “ATHE1ST” license plate. Chris told me he wanted to get the “ATHEIST” plate (with an “I”), but the online system said it was unavailable. When he substituted the number “1” for the …

By Matt McFarland Google announced Friday that it has achieved state-of-the-art results in using artificial intelligence to identify breast cancer. The findings are a reminder of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, and its potential to improve global health. Google used a flavor of artificial intelligence called deep learning to analyze thousands of slides of …

By Elizabeth Pennisi WASHINGTON, D.C.—When it comes to genome sequencing, visionaries like to throw around big numbers: There’s the UK Biobank, for example, which promises to decipher the genomes of 500,000 individuals, or Iceland’s effort to study the genomes of its entire human population. Yesterday, at a meeting here organized by the Smithsonian Initiative on Biodiversity …

By Sean Illing Why do people pretend to know things? Why does confidence so often scale with ignorance? Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some compelling answers to these questions. “We’re biased to preserve our sense of rightness,” he told me, “and we have to be.” The author of The …

By Michael French Among filthy puddles of rainwater in a slum in Alabang, a district just south of the Philippines’ capital city of Manila, a young woman named Jahziel Tayco Ferrer was teaching a science lesson. A group of children sat around her on a cracked basketball court, taking shelter from the fierce midday sun …

By Jane Wakefield IBM has made its quantum computing system commercially available to businesses and beefed up an existing system used by the research community. The firm is hoping to boost the numbers of people able to use such computers. The machine, based in New York, has been available via the internet since May last …

By Brian Switek A good cephalopod fossil is hard to find. Although ammonite shells, belemnite guards and other indicators of hard body parts are abundant in the fossil record, paleontologists seldom get to see the characteristic soft-tissue anatomy of these many-armed swimmers. Finds are so rare that one from 1982 still stands out: a 165-million-year-old …

By Charlie Savage President Trump’s claim on Twitter early Saturday that he had “just found out” that “President Obama was tapping my phones in October,” an accusation for which he offered no evidence, has set off another spasm surrounding his young administration. On Sunday, Mr. Trump’s spokesman said the administration was asking Congress to investigate …

By Robert Service Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in …

By Tom Nichols Do Americans hate science? They certainly seem to hate it more than they used to, as they rage against experts in every field. This is more than a traditional American distaste for eggheads and intellectuals. Americans, increasingly, are acting (and voting) on myths and misinformation about science, and placing themselves at significant …

By Helen Briggs The last woolly mammoths to walk the Earth were so wracked with genetic disease that they lost their sense of smell, shunned company, and had a strange shiny coat. That’s the verdict of scientists who have analysed ancient DNA of the extinct animals for mutations. The studies suggest the last mammoths died …