All Stories
- Particle Physics
This is the first known particle with four of the same kind of quark
A weird four-quark particle could be a unique testing ground for the strong force that governs how quarks stick together.
- Science & Society
All kinds of outbreaks, from COVID-19 to violence, share the same principles
Adam Kucharski talks about his new book ‘The Rules of Contagion,’ a timely read during the coronavirus pandemic.
- Health & Medicine
How making a COVID-19 vaccine confronts thorny ethical issues
COVID-19 vaccines will face plenty of ethical questions. Concerns arise long before anything is loaded into a syringe.
- Space
Self-destructive civilizations may doom our search for alien intelligence
A lack of signals from space may also be bad news for Earthlings.
- Planetary Science
Some exoplanets may be covered in weird water that’s between liquid and gas
“Supercritical” water, a corrosive substance used to break down toxic waste on Earth, coats some small worlds around other stars, simulations suggest.
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Can science help create a more just society?
Editor in chief Nancy Shute writes about how science can create a more just society and how journalists and journalism needs to change for the better.
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- Humans
Underwater caves once hosted the Americas’ oldest known ochre mines
Now-submerged chambers in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula contain ancient evidence of extensive red ochre removal as early as 12,000 years ago.
- Life
Bizarre caecilians may be the only amphibians with venomous bites
Microscope and chemical analyses suggest that, like snakes, caecilians have glands near their teeth that secrete venom.
- Health & Medicine
4 reasons not to worry about that ‘new’ swine flu in the news
Researchers identified a pig influenza virus that shares features with one that sparked the 2009 pandemic — that doesn’t mean another one is imminent.
- Animals
A sparrow song remix took over North America with astonishing speed
A variation on the white-throated sparrow’s song spread 3,300 kilometers in just a few decades.
- Earth
Earth’s annual e-waste could grow to 75 million metric tons by 2030
Unwanted electronic waste is piling up rapidly around the globe, while collection and recycling efforts are failing to keep pace, a new report shows.
