Feature
- Humans
Year in Review: Language learning starts before birth
Babies seem familiar with vowels and words heard while in the womb.
- Science & Society
Year in Review: High court rules against gene patents
The justices’ decision opens the way for choices in DNA testing.
- Health & Medicine
Year in Review: Sleep clears the cluttered brain
Some forms of brain washing are good, like the thorough hosing the brain gets during sleep.
- Life
Year in Review: A double dose of virus scares
Outbreaks of two deadly viruses captured the world’s attention in 2013, but neither turned into the global pandemic expected to strike one of these years.
- Humans
Year in Review: New discoveries reshape debate over human ancestry
Human evolution appears poised for a scientific makeover as the relationships among early hominids are disputed.
- Cosmology
Year in Review: Planck refines cosmic history
The satellite data hint at a slower expansion rate for universe.
- Life
Year in Review: Bioengineers make headway on human body parts
New techniques produce mimics of brain, liver, heart, kidney, retina.
- Life
Year in Review: Your body is mostly microbes
Microbiome results argue for new view of animals as superorganisms.
- Science & Society
Top 25 stories of 2013, from microbes to meteorites
This year, careful readers may have noticed a steady accumulation of revelations about the bacterial communities that call the human body home.
- Science & Society
Heal thy neighbor
As antidepressants and other drugs gradually replace psychotherapy in the United States, new forms of the talking cure are growing in popularity in developing countries ravaged by civil war and poverty.
- Neuroscience
Global neuro lab
With more than 50 million users, the brain-training website Lumosity is giving scientists access to an enormous collection of cognitive performance data. Mining the dataset could be the first step toward a new kind of neuroscience.
- Science & Society
Science slowdown
The recent federal government shutdown, which furloughed more than 800,000 government workers and may have cost the nation as much as $24 billion, has sent ripples through the nation’s scientific research enterprise.
