News
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Health & Medicine
Why COVID-19 is both startlingly unique and painfully familiar
As doctors and patients learn more about the wide range of COVID-19 symptoms, the coronavirus is proving both novel and recognizable.
- Space
A newfound exoplanet may be the exposed core of a gas giant
A planet about 734 light-years away could be a former gas giant that lost its atmosphere or a failed giant that never finished growing.
- Climate
4 ways to put the 100-degree Arctic heat record in context
June’s record heat in Siberia is part of a much bigger picture of dramatic climate change in the Arctic.
- Science & Society
The U.S. largely wasted time bought by COVID-19 lockdowns. Now what?
As states reopen, most don’t have adequate systems in place to test, trace and isolate new COVID-19 cases, setting the stage for future outbreaks.
- Health & Medicine
Here’s what we’ve learned in six months of COVID-19 — and what we still don’t know
Six months into the new coronavirus pandemic, researchers have raced to uncover crucial information about SARS-CoV-2. But much is still unknown.
