News
- Neuroscience
Boosting a liver protein may mimic the brain benefits of exercise
Finding that liver-made proteins influence the brain may advance the quest for an “exercise pill” that can deliver the benefits of physical activity.
- Science & Society
There’s little evidence showing which police reforms work
When stories of police violence against civilians capture public attention, reforms follow despite a dearth of hard data quantifying their impact.
- Physics
Physicists have ‘braided’ strange quasiparticles called anyons
All known particles fall into two classes. Physicists just found new evidence of a third class in 2-D materials.
- Animals
Calculating a dog’s age in human years is harder than you think
People generally convert a dog’s age to human years by multiplying its age by seven. But a new study shows the math is way more complex.
- Genetics
South Americans may have traveled to Polynesia 800 years ago
DNA analyses suggest that Indigenous people from South America had a role in the early peopling of Polynesia.
- Health & Medicine
What you need to know about the airborne transmission of COVID-19
More than 200 experts have implored the World Health Organization to acknowledge that the coronavirus can spread through the air.
- 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.
- 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.
