The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the […]
Read MoreRichard Battarbee spent his entire life studying freshwater ecology as an academic at University College London—but it was only when he retired to Yorkshire that he found himself on the frontline of a battle to save a river. Fishermen in the town of Ilkley near where he lived started catching condoms, wet wipes and sanitary […]
Read MoreIt’s a sweltering summer in Australia, and the corals on the Great Barrier Reef are showing early signs of stress. The authority that manages the largest coral reef system in the world is expecting another bleaching event in the coming weeks—if that happens, it will be the sixth time since 1998 that spikes in water […]
Read MoreDe-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in sub-zero environments. To get to these so-called “functional mammoths,” Colossal’s scientists need to solve a […]
Read MoreSo what’s going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere. “The oceans are our saviors, in a way,” says biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “Things […]
Read More“The very reason that we have magnetism in our everyday lives is because of the strength of electron exchange interactions,” said study coauthor Ataç İmamoğlu, a physicist also at the Institute for Quantum Electronics. However, as Nagaoka theorized in the 1960s, exchange interactions may not be the only way to make a material magnetic. Nagaoka […]
Read MoreTo keep IL-12 inside tumors, scientists at Strand designed a set of instructions called a genetic circuit that tells the mRNA to make the inflammatory protein only when it detects the tumor microenvironment. The circuit is designed to sense levels of microRNA—molecules that naturally regulate gene expression and give off different signatures in cancer cells […]
Read MoreThis story originally appeared in Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than […]
Read MoreIllustration: NASA Their analysis looks convincing, says Andrew Rivkin, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory who studies the composition of asteroids and who was not involved in the paper. “Short of going and grabbing a piece, like NASA just did with Bennu, this is probably as close to conclusive as we […]
Read MoreBioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling […]
Read MoreWhat you need to know Australia’s national science agency and the University of Western Australia are using Age of Empires to simulate ant warfare. Australia has spent millions fighting invasive ant species, and the simulated battlefields have provided data that may help improve the outcome of battles between native and invasive ant species. Back in […]
Read MoreIn the center of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A black-and-white layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and future. Most people call it, […]
Read MoreWith any organ transplant, doctors are trying to balance how to prevent infections while tamping down the immune system. Without immunosuppressive drugs, the transplant organ will be rejected. But giving patients too much of these drugs makes them susceptible to infections. That’s what researchers think happened in Bennett’s case. To treat the CMV infection, doctors […]
Read MoreAn influential group of researchers is making the case for new ways to search the skies for signs of alien societies. They argue that current methods could be biased by human-centered thinking, and that it’s time to take advantage of data-driven, machine learning techniques. The team of 22 scientists released a new report on August […]
Read MoreIn a first, researchers in China have used pigs to grow early-stage kidneys made up of mostly human cells. The advance is a step closer to producing organs in animals that could one day be transplanted to people. More than 100,000 people in the United States are on the national transplant waiting list, and 17 […]
Read MoreSo much on this planet depends on a simple matter of density. In the Atlantic Ocean, a conveyor belt of warm water heads north from the tropics, reaching the Arctic and chilling. That makes it denser, so it sinks and heads back south, finishing the loop. This system of currents, known as the Atlantic Meridional […]
Read MoreIn 2008, a fruit fly known as the spotted-wing drosophila made its way from Southeast Asia to the continental US, likely hitching a ride on fruit shipments. First detected in California raspberry fields, the insect rapidly spread to other states. Unlike the common fruit fly, which is attracted to rotting food, spotted-wing drosophila prefers ripening, […]
Read MoreThat pig pancreas study was published in 1988. Were drug companies paying much attention then? Holst: I have always had friendly relationships with [Ozempic and Wegovy manufacturer] Novo Nordisk. It’s in Denmark, just up the street, and we were interested in the same things, so I kept telling them about what we were doing. They were […]
Read MoreRivron’s laboratory was the first to create these embryo-like structures in 2018. His team showed that mouse stem cells can self-organize into structures that resemble a blastocyst, which forms five or six days after sperm fertilizes an egg. They dubbed the balls of cells “blastoids.” Then in 2021, several labs showed they could create human blastoids using stem cells. […]
Read MoreYears ago, Christopher Kyba was skeptical about astronomy data collected by citizen scientists—after all, it relies on people making naked-eye assessments of the night sky. But when a student wrote to him with a question about measuring the sky’s brightness, he thought of the Globe at Night citizen science project, which launched in 2006 to let […]
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