Editor's Note
- Earth
Sometimes value lies deep below the surface
Stories on jellyfish, Ebola, carbon capture's future and heart disease's past reveal how crises old and new often lead to science's healthiest advances.
- Astronomy
The craziest NASA mission ever proposed
In this issue, Meghan Rosen provides an in-depth report on that mission, but without the erroneous conclusion that the Asteroid Redirect Mission has much to do with asteroid defense.
- Astronomy
Listening in on cosmic messages
Yet to be deciphered, fast radio bursts represent the latest messages from space with the potential to tell us more about the cosmos.
- Climate
Adapting to climate change: Let us consider the ways
Many organisms do have tools to deal with sudden environmental changes, as freelance writer and Science News “Wild Things” blogger Sarah Zielinski reports.
-
- Tech
Scientists struggle to find signals in the noise
Even in a simple system like email, detecting the signal from the noise is not always easy. It can be even more difficult separating a dazzling discovery from dust or whether a breast mass is cancerous or benign.
- Health & Medicine
Your brain on marijuana: two views
Many of the “facts” that people believe to be true about marijuana are not supported by science, and while the pro-pot lobby cherry-picks data to support its arguments (denying marijuana’s addictiveness, for example), so too do anti-marijuana groups, which play up pot’s dangers.
- Science & Society
One of the best ways for kids to learn science: by doing it
A biodegradable Band-Aid. A low-cost, ultrasonic guide to parallel parking. A reinvention of the toilet. These were among the nearly 1,400 science fair projects on display at the 2014 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Science News’ parent organization, the Society for Science & the Public, has run the annual event since 1950.
-
Prying tales from ancient DNA and a far-away moon
Exploring the DNA of ancient bones on Earth and the waters of an icy moon, Europa, could shift our views of life.
- Genetics
New tools reveal new truths about fungi, flies, antibiotics
In the newsroom, any story about a new scientific method faces an uphill battle. In this issue are a number of stories that feature how science is done.
- Earth
Science can save lives, but only if society lets it
Society faces lots of problems that science can’t yet fix. But there are also plenty of cases in which scientists know enough to avert tragedy.
- Cosmology
Gravitational wave detection a big day for the Big Bang
On a snowy St. Patrick’s Day, our offices officially shut down by a late-winter storm, the Science News staff was abuzz over the biggest thing since the Higgs boson. On March 17, scientists announced the first direct evidence of the theory of cosmic inflation: primordial gravitational waves.
