All Stories
- Humans
Puberty can repair the brain’s stress responses after hardship early in life
Puberty may erase the shadow of trauma for children who had a difficult start.
- Earth
What’s behind August 2020’s extreme weather? Climate change and bad luck
On top of a pandemic, the United States is having an epic weather year — a combination of bad luck and a stage set by a warming climate.
- Planetary Science
Earth’s building blocks may have had far more water than previously thought
Space rocks and dust from the inner solar system could have delivered enough water to account for all the H2O in the planet’s mantle.
- Earth
Improved three-week weather forecasts could save lives from disaster
Meteorologists are pushing to make forecasts good enough to fill the gap between short-term and seasonal.
- Science & Society
Mandatory mail-in voting hurts neither Democratic nor Republican candidates
A new study suggests that requiring people to cast mail-in ballots actually leads to a slightly increased turnout for both political parties.
- Health & Medicine
In a first, a person’s immune system fought HIV — and won
Some rare people may purge most HIV from their bodies, leaving only broken copies of the virus or copies locked in molecular prisons, from which there is no escape.
- Earth
Carbon dioxide from Earth’s mantle may trigger some Italian earthquakes
In the central Apennines of Italy, spikes in natural carbon dioxide emissions line up with the biggest earthquakes.
- Microbes
If bacteria band together, they can survive for years in space
Tiny clumps of bacteria can survive at least three years in outer space, raising the prospect of interplanetary travel by microbial life.
- Health & Medicine
COVID-19 plasma treatments may be safe, but we don’t know if they work
Blood plasma from COVID-19 survivors can be used to treat hospitalized patients, FDA says, but researchers question how well it works.
- Health & Medicine
What we can learn from how a doctor’s race can affect Black newborns’ survival
When Black physicians attended Black newborns after a hospital birth, it reduced the mortality gap between Black and white babies.
- Animals
Female hyenas kill off cubs in their own clans
Along with starvation and mauling by lions, infanticide leads as a cause of hyena cub death. Such killings may serve to enforce the social order.
- Health & Medicine
A man in Hong Kong is the first confirmed case of coronavirus reinfection
During a 33-year-old man’s first round with the virus, he had symptoms, but not the second time — a hint his immune system protected him from disease.
