News
- Health & Medicine
Ripples in rats’ brains tied to memory may also reduce sugar levels
Brain signals called sharp-wave ripples have an unexpected job: influencing the body’s sugar levels, a study in rats suggests.
- Health & Medicine
6 answers to parents’ COVID-19 questions as kids return to school
Universal masking in schools could prevent a bumpy 2021–22 schoolyear and keep kids, many of whom are too young to be vaccinated, safe, experts say.
- Physics
Windbreaks, surprisingly, could help wind farms boost power output
Wind farm performance could be improved by 10 percent by using low barriers to increase the wind speed directed at the turbines, simulations suggest.
- Health & Medicine
What kids lost when COVID-19 upended school
Researchers are starting to tally how a year and a half of pandemic has left many children struggling academically and emotionally.
- Climate
The new UN climate change report shows there’s no time for denial or delay
Human-caused climate change is unequivocally behind extreme weather events from heat waves to floods to droughts, a massive new assessment concludes.
- Physics
Colliding photons were spotted making matter. But are the photons ‘real’?
Smashups of particles of light creating electrons and positrons could demonstrate the physics of Einstein’s equation E=mc2.
- Health & Medicine
Schools are reopening. COVID-19 is still here. What does that mean for kids?
Children do get COVID-19, and some become very sick and even die. But the disease’s long-term effects on kids remain uncertain.
- Animals
Squirrels use parkour tricks when leaping from branch to branch
Squirrels navigate through trees by making rapid calculations to balance trade-offs between branch flexibility and the distance between tree limbs.
- Space
A lunar magnetic field may have lasted for only a short time
New analyses of Apollo-era lunar rocks suggest that any magnetosphere that the moon ever had endured for no more than 500 million years.
- Physics
A bounty of potential gravitational wave events hints at exciting possibilities
Of about 1,200 possible events, most are probably false alarms, but some could be ripples in spacetime that are especially hard to spot.
- Animals
Snake-eating spiders are surprisingly common
Spiders from at least 11 families feed on serpents many times their size, employing a host of tactics to turn even venomous snakes into soup.
- Physics
Black holes born with magnetic fields quickly shed them
New computer simulations show one way that black holes might discard their magnetic fields.
