Science

Consider the problem an infant immune system has to solve. Almost everything it meets in its first months is harmless and much of it is edible, so a system tuned to attack novelty would attack…

You cannot drill into the thing you want to study. The brine that feeds Blood Falls sits somewhere under hundreds of meters of Taylor Glacier, and what reaches the surface is an intermittent…

The whole trick of super-resolution microscopy is a kind of accounting. You cannot see a fluorescent molecule; you can only see the smeared blob of light it throws onto a camera, and that blob is…

Pick any two eukaryotes far enough apart and the differences are almost comic. A human being and Acanthamoeba castellanii, a soil amoeba that spends its life eating bacteria in damp earth, last…

In 1991 the Medical Research Council stopped a trial early. Women who had already carried one pregnancy affected by a neural tube defect were given either folic acid or a placebo before trying to…

Haiyan is over. It came ashore in the Philippines in November 2013, and what it did there is a matter of record. But a storm that has finished happening can be made to happen again, which is the…

An international team of paleontologists has named a new dinosaur, Musango matusadonaensis, from a partial skeleton excavated in 2018 on the shoreline of Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe. The…

Put a drop of nutrient solution on this cloth and, a few days later, fine fuzz has grown exactly where the drop landed. Its makers have written their institute's logo that way, along with snowflakes,…

Pull on a rubber band and nothing interesting happens at the molecular level; the chains just uncoil. The materials described in a new paper answer force with a decision. The building blocks are…

At 4:51 a.m. on Saturday, some North Islanders got a few seconds of notice that most earthquakes never give. Their phones buzzed loudly, overriding silent mode, a heartbeat before the ground began to…

The brain runs on roughly the wattage of a dim light bulb. A large AI model can draw the output of a small power plant. That gap is the quiet motivation behind a whole field of research, and behind a…

The hardest part was never the motor. It was the listening. When a person's hand still works, the brain sends a clean order down the nerves and the muscles snap to it. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…