Science

By Quirin Schiermeier, Holly Else, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, T.V. Padma, & Nisha Gaind Autumn heralds the start of a new academic year in much of the world, but in 2020, the term comes with the disruption of the COVID-19 outbreak and a surge in infections in many regions. Many universities have welcomed students and researchers …

By Maria Cramer The Great Barrier Reef, one of the earth’s most precious habitats, lost half of its coral populations in the last quarter-century, a decline that researchers in Australia said would continue unless drastic action is taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. Researchers studied coral colonies along the length of the reef …

By Jon Cohen This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans. The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit …

By Michelle Starr From the heart of a galaxy 215 million light-years away, a brilliant flash of light flared into the void of space – the last scream of light from a dying star as it veered too close and was pulled apart by a supermassive black hole. It’s the closest such death of a …

By Hilton Lewis Standing in my office 25 years ago was an unknown, newly minted astronomer with a half-smile on her face. She had come with an outrageous request—really a demand—that my team modify our exhaustively tested software to make one of our most important and in-demand scientific instruments do something it had never been …

By Ashley Strickland Earth is the only planet we know of so far to host life, but it may not be the best place for life when compared with “superhabitable” planets, according to a new study. And as scientists search for other planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets, that could host life, planets …

By Mindy Weisberger Megalodon was the most massive shark that ever lived, and its gargantuan girth was highly unusual even among sharks, scientists recently discovered. In fact, Megalodon’s gigantism — it’s estimated to have measured up to 50 feet (15 meters) in length, about as long as a bowling lane — was “off-the-scale,” researchers wrote in …

By Elizabeth Preston In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, baboons live out their daily dramas. They tussle, they mate, they care for their young. Some are loners and others have lots of friends. Now research has shown that those platonic relationships might be just as important as the relationships that make more baby monkeys. Male …

By Rafi Letzter If life does exist on Venus, NASA may have first detected it back in 1978. But the finding went unnoticed for 42 years. Life on Venus is still a long shot. But there’s reason to take the idea seriously. On Sept. 14, a team of scientists made a bombshell announcement in the …

By Jeffrey Guhin It’s easy to be cynical about the religious right, and, by extension, the direction of our country. Despite representing fewer and fewer American each year, they continue to exploit advantages baked into the Constitution via the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court. They are now about to flip to the court a 6–3 conservative majority that …

By Frank Jordans Scientists say genes that some people have inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors may increase their likelihood of suffering severe forms of COVID-19. A study by European scientists published Wednesday by the journal Nature examined a cluster of genes that have been linked to a higher risk of hospitalization and respiratory failure in …

By Jean-Paul Delahaye Everyone loves unsolved mysteries. Examples include Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific in 1937 and the daring escape of inmates Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin from Alcatraz Island in California in 1962. Moreover our interest holds even if the mystery is based on a joke. Take author Douglas Adams’s popular …