Humans
‘The Joy of Sweat’ will help you make peace with perspiration
Dripping with science and history, a new book by science journalist Sarah Everts seeks to take the stigma off sweat.
Featured Articles in this Issue
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Cover Story
Why planting tons of trees isn’t enough to solve climate change
Massive projects need much more planning and follow-through to succeed – and other tree protections need to happen too.
Reviews & Previews
Science Visualized
Astronomy
Watch this beautiful, high-resolution simulation of how stars are born
The STARFORGE simulation follows a giant gas cloud as it collapses into new stars, accounting for all the phenomena thought to influence the outcome.
Notebook
Health & Medicine
Vaccinating people in developing countries costs far less than doing nothing
Shots for half the adults in those countries will cost $9.3 billion, the Rockefeller Foundation reports. Doing nothing could cost trillions.
Features
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Mixing trees and crops can help both farmers and the climate
Agriculture is a major driver of climate change and biodiversity loss. But integrating trees into farming practices can boost food production, store carbon and save species.
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The first step in using trees to slow climate change: Protect the trees we have
In all the fuss over planting trillions of trees, we need to protect the forests that already exist.
More Stories from the July 3, 2021 issue
- Chemistry
A sweet father-son bond inspires tasty new molecule models
New edible models of proteins could spark students’ interest in the world of chemistry, especially students who are blind.
- Physics
Auroras form when electrons from space ride waves in Earth’s magnetic field
New lab results confirm that auroras are triggered by disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field called Alfvén waves.
- Life
Even hard-to-kill tardigrades can’t always survive being shot out of a gun
A recent experiment put tardigrades’ indestructibility to the test by firing the critters at speeds up to 1,000 meters per second.
- Health & Medicine
FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug despite controversy over whether it works
A new Alzheimer's treatment slows progression of the disease, the drug’s developers say. But some researchers question its effectiveness.
- Animals
Gray wolves scare deer from roads, reducing dangerous collisions
The predators use roads as travel corridors, creating “a landscape of fear” that keeps deer away and saves millions of dollars a year, a study finds.
- Astronomy
An arc of galaxies 3 billion light-years long may challenge cosmology
Dubbed “the Giant Arc,” the purported structure is much larger than expected in a cosmos where matter is thought to be evenly distributed.
- Paleontology
Something mysteriously wiped out about 90 percent of sharks 19 million years ago
Deep sediments beneath the Pacific Ocean revealed a mystery: a massive shark die-off with no obvious cause.
- Physics
Nuclear clocks could outdo atomic clocks as the most precise timepieces
Better clocks could improve technologies that depend on them, such as GPS navigation, and help test fundamental ideas of physics.
- Animals
The mere sight of illness may kick-start a canary’s immune system
Healthy canaries ramp up their immune systems when exposed to visibly sick birds, without actually being infected themselves.
- Particle Physics
In a first, neutrinos were caught interacting at the Large Hadron Collider
Despite the LHC’s fame, all its detectors were oblivious to neutrinos. But not anymore.
- Animals
Newly recognized tricks help elephants suck up huge amounts of water
New ultrasound imaging reveals what goes on inside a pachyderm’s trunk while feeding. It can snort water at the rate of 24 shower heads.
- Particle Physics
Physicists dream big with an idea for a particle collider on the moon
A lunar particle collider that dwarfs any such facility on Earth might not be impossible, according to new calculations.
- Health & Medicine
Food that boosts gut microbes could be a new way to help malnourished kids
Malnourished children in Bangladesh fed a food aimed at restoring gut health grew more than those who got a traditional high-calorie supplement.
- Archaeology
New clues suggest people reached the Americas around 30,000 years ago
Ancient rabbit bones from a Mexican rock-shelter point to humans arriving on the continent as much as 10,000 years earlier than often assumed.
- Animals
Mouse sperm thrived despite six years of exposure to space radiation
A space station experiment suggests future deep-space explorers don’t need to worry about passing the effects of space radiation on to their children.
- Health & Medicine
50 years ago, scientists found a virus lurking in human cancer cells
In 1971, scientists were building a case for viruses as a cause of cancer. Fifty years later, cancer-preventing vaccines are now a reality.
