With the finding of the first alien world around another sunlike star almost 25 years ago, astronomers began what would become known as the “exoplanet revolution.” As the rate of discovery increased and new data poured in, it became clear that the cosmos is awash in planets—big planets, small planets, planets broiled by their stars…

Bread is interwoven into many, if not most, meals around the world, from a basket of warm focaccia on the table at a restaurant to flat loaves of naan accompanying a curry. Carbs, particularly bread, are loved by all. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could survive entirely on this wonderful food group? The short…

We have more questions than answers about ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object detected near Earth. The visitor was initially detected as it left the solar system, and the meagre data collected by astronomical observatories have proven difficult to explain. What we do know is that ‘Oumuamua was neither a comet nor an asteroid, and no…

A major enigma remains a century after Alois Alzheimer identified the disease that bears his name. Despite decades of research, no one understands what causes Alzheimer’s disease in the long run. Genetic mutations, accelerated aging, immune system dysfunction, and environmental variables have all been suggested as possibilities, but experts have yet to come up with…

Mariusz Stepien went to a farmer’s field on June 21, 2020, to see what he could find. That particular Sunday, he chose a pasture because it was the first time he’d been out in months. It appeared like a tourism ad when Scotland implemented movement restrictions in the early stages of the COVID crisis. The…

For decades, people have known that we were born on a damaged planet on the verge of environmental collapse. Our minds, on the other hand, are ill-equipped to comprehend the magnitude of the Earth’s ecological death spiral. We try to imagine how climate change could displace entire populations in just a few decades. We can’t…

Maverick individuals who make a huge difference through their spot-on hunches are becoming an increasingly rare breed in this age of big research, with fundamental physics generally investigated in sprawling institutions such as CERN and LIGO. As a result, those who have done so in the past have taken on a mythic nature. Because of…

As social beings, we tend to focus on autism’s social issues, such as difficulty speaking, establishing friends, and displaying empathy. I am a geneticist and the mother of an autistic adolescent. I’m concerned, too, about whether he’ll be able to carry on a conversation and go grocery shopping, as well as whether he’ll ever have…

I had an acquaintance in my early twenties who was clever, charming, Ivy-educated, and wealthy, the heir to a family fortune. I’m going to call him Gallagher. He was free to do anything he pleased. He dabbled in subjects such as neurology, law, philosophy, and others. But he was so critical and picky that he…

With recent studies arguing for immaculate observing conditions tucked in the uplands, Chinese astronomers seek to create a massive observatory program on the world’s roof, the Tibetan Plateau. The research focuses on a study site near Lenghu Town in Qinghai Province, which is located 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) west of Beijing at an altitude of…

The #ScienceUpFirst campaign was designed to help individuals make educated health decisions by providing, supporting, and amplifying correct scientific information. Over four million people have died as a result of COVID worldwide, with over 34 million cases and over 610,000 deaths in the United States alone. Worse, the pandemic does not appear to be nearing…

As scientists and engineers, we consider ourselves fortunate to work in fields that advance knowledge and understanding. Participating in research and discovery, as well as mentoring young scientists, has enormous benefits. Science is a unique and vital institution in and of itself. It thrives after centuries of human ingenuity and effort and continues to make…

There were only around 170 million Homo sapiens roaming the earth a little over two millennia ago, at the commencement of the Common Era. Except for the enormous speed bump known as the Black Death, which took away 75 million people worldwide, the global human population has grown dramatically, from 910 million in 1800 to…

Children are bombarded with gender signals from the minute they are born. Girls wear pink, while boys wear blue; girls are delicate, while guys are tough; girls are ballerinas, while boys are construction workers. These messages aren’t always obvious, but they’re there nonetheless. Kids take these signals and try to make sense of the world…

Mario Krenn, a quantum physicist, recalls sitting at a Vienna café in early 2016 reading through computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had discovered. MELVIN was a sort of artificial intelligence created by Krenn using a machine-learning algorithm. Its mission was to mix and match the components of typical quantum experiments to…

Last week, Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas asked a US Forest Service employee if her agency or the Bureau of Land Management could alter the moon’s or Earth’s orbit to reverse the impacts of human-caused climate change during a congressional hearing. Doesn’t that seem like an entirely appropriate plan? Let’s get started. First, we…

This year, delta-8 THC, a new marijuana cousin, erupted onto the national scene. It’s advertised as “weed light” or “the superior version of THC” on the cannabis internet. It sold as a vape or an edible, and the high is similar to a moderate form of traditional marijuana. In terms of chemical structure—three carbon rings,…

Carl Georg Count Sievers, an amateur archaeologist, performed excavations along the Salaca River in Latvia in 1875. He discovered two graves: one for a 12-to-18-year-old girl (named RV 1852) and another for a 20-to-30-year-old man (designated RV 1853). (RV 2039). Analysis of RV 2039 about 150 years later reveals that not only is he over…

A nearly intact ancient human skull rested at the bottom of a well in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China, for more than 80 years, according to Chris Stringer. According to legend, laborers building a bridge in Japanese-occupied northeastern China uncovered the specimen from the Songhua River’s bed in 1933. The crew foreman understood the worth…

A Soviet-era dam is providing energy for a distant mining operation somewhere in Siberia. However, nothing tangible is emerging from the soil. Instead, the hydroelectric power plant powers enormous machines that churn out complex mathematical answers. To put it another way, this renewable energy is being utilized to mine bitcoin. Jason Deane, a Bitcoin analyst,…

While apps like Signal make it possible to exchange encrypted communications, no system is fully secure. But, owing to quantum mechanics, the esoteric area of science that regulates the cosmos at the lowest scales, encryption may become far more difficult to crack in the future. You’re almost probably viewing this on an electrical gadget that…

A Canadian radio telescope discovered 535 fast radio bursts in one go, quadrupling the known number of these brief, very powerful events. The long-awaited findings reveal that these perplexing events may be divided into two types: one-time bursts and recurrent bursts that continue at least ten times longer on average. Fast radio bursts could be…

A tiny phase II clinical trial published on June 9 in the journal Science Translational Medicine indicated that nitrous oxide (often known as “laughing gas” in the dentist’s office) may help some people with treatment-resistant depression reduce their symptoms. Researchers have been interested in approaches that act faster than traditional depression medications, such as SSRIs,…

Techniques for inducing mutations in viruses that give microorganisms new abilities are included in the microbiology toolbox. Scientists do these experiments for a variety of purposes, including to learn how bacteria avoid detection by our immune systems. However, enhancing a pathogen’s capabilities comes with apparent hazards, especially if this “gain of function” implies increased virulence…

Here’s a game for you. In 1948, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, devised. He was attempting to model English as a random process. Pick out a random book from your shelf, open it, point to a random area on the page, and write down the first two letters you see. Let’s pretend they’re…

A journey that began over a century ago with the invention of the first electron microscope has progressed once again.A group of physicists has gotten even closer to the ultimate limit of how many objects can be amplified, according to experts. The world record for the greatest resolution attained using a microscope was previously held…

The Coxcatlan Cave in Mexico’s Valley of Tehuacan has housed tens of thousands of years of human history through the millennia. Records of the early domestication of maize and the start of agriculture have been preserved in layers of dust, rocks, charcoal, and decaying plants. But under them, all lies something even more surprising: what…

COVID-19 aggravated several pre-existing racial health inequities, ushering in a racial reckoning in medicine. As a response, several medical institutions have endeavoured to make significant adjustments in their teaching and clinical environments to address systematic racism. The history of present illness (H.P.I.), a tool utilized by practically every physician daily, may, nevertheless, continue to perpetuate…

The current coronavirus pandemic may not appear to be an apparent catalyst for contemplating biological transcendence. But the weird thing is that we’ve been inadvertent participants in exactly such an event in our response to this crisis. The concept of transcendence has existed for a long time, under several names and guises. It captures the…

I’ve been invited to speak with well-known writers, singers, and film producers about my new book, Extraterrestrial, during the last several months. Before our chats, I had been the recipient (and admirer) of their creative work, but suddenly they were interested in my scientific studies. These discussions prompted me to see parallels between art and…

Scientists have been perplexed by a subatomic riddle for more than 40 years: why can pieces of splitting atomic nuclei emerge turning from the wreckage? According to experts, these baffling gyrations may now be explained by an action similar to that which occurs when a rubber band is snapped.Consider a big stack of coins to…

According to scientists, quasicrystals—so-called “impossible” materials with strange, non-repeating structures—have been discovered in leftovers of the world’s first nuclear bomb test. The hitherto unknown structure, composed of iron, silicon, copper, and calcium, was most likely created by using vaporized desert sand and copper wires. Similar materials have been made in the lab and found in…

At the University of Washington, Neel Bhatt is an assistant professor of otolaryngology. This article first appeared on The Conversation.I frequently record my patients speaking as a surgeon who specializes in treating people with vocal difficulties. These recordings are helpful to me. They allow me to follow minor changes in their voices from a visit…

Until life-saving vaccinations are widely accessible, it will be challenging to bring the COVID-19 epidemic to a halt. That is a reality with which the world is increasingly confronted.However, vaccination for most of the world’s population remains a long way off for the time being, as scientists debate how to scale up vaccine manufacturing and…

Mosquito eggs planted in the Florida Keys are expected to hatch tens of thousands of genetically engineered mosquitoes this week, marking the first time such insects have been released in the wild in the United States . The eggs were provided in late April by Oxitec, a biotechnology company, as part of a federally permitted…

You’re still stressed if you’re reading this. Never fear: we’ve combed through the facts to find out what psychology has to say about discovering zen—and keeping it through adversity. Do you want to give meditation a shot? Improve your bathing habits? How do you stop fear in its tracks? Calm Month has begun. Mother Nature…

Lars Schmitz is a Scripps College associate professor of biology. Jonah Choiniere is a University of the Witwatersrand professor of dinosaur paleontology, and Roger Benson is a University of Oxford professor of Palaeobiology. This article first appeared on Conversation. Barn owls, bats, leopards, and various other species rely on their acute senses to survive and…

It’s food dogma: calories in, calories out. If you count more calories than you expend, you will gain weight; if you consume fewer calories, you will lose weight. Keeping track of it has never been simpler where you are with this calorie balance. Hundreds of diet-tracking applications, ranging from MyFitnessPal to Livestrong, provide dietary specifics…

Per year, the plant mating season impacts a more significant number of people. Spring is the exciting time of year when flowers bloom, trees leaf, and billions of pollen grains take off in the hopes of fertilizing another crop. However, all of these tiny plant sperms end up in our mouths, triggering an allergic response…

I look for inspiration everywhere I can find it. My girlfriend recently informed me about a viral video in which a young girl expresses her dissatisfaction with the mathematics. “I was just doing makeup for work,” Gracie Cunningham says as she applies foundation to her face, “and I just wanted to tell you guys how…

Wayne State University’s Arash Javanbakht is an associate professor of psychiatry. This essay was first published in The Conversation. MDMA paired with psychotherapy can better treat post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, including one that will be published in Nature Medicine soon. The news sparked widespread hope and enthusiasm in the newspapers, as well as among…

The discovery that truth is essentially a permanent phenomenon is one of quantum mechanics’ most annoying consequences. Quantum mechanics is not just a microscopic theory: all matter is essentially quantum—just it’s that strange quantum phenomenon is difficult to find in something more significant than a few atoms. The life of macroscopic, so-called “classical” objects is…

It’s springtime, and the city is magnificent; this year’s snow looked like it was on top of winter. However, as we consider what gave us joy during this challenging period, birds were at the top of many people’s happy lists. Those we saw from our windows—or on the street in New York City—in particular. House…

Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have captivated scientists since their observation in the 1960s, who are curious about where they originate from. Like all cosmic rays, they are arguably misnamed: they are subatomic particles zipping through space, not “rays” of radiation. These ultrahigh energies are the product of ultrafast speeds that exceed the speed of light. A…

Physicists have been unable to solve the puzzle of what happened when a vanishingly tiny seed exploded into the cosmos for a long time. Now, one physicist believes he understands why scientists haven’t been able to come up with a physical explanation for inflation: the world won’t let us. The physicist explains a recent theory…

In 1833, a nearly perfectly spherical fish showed up on the shores of Greenland and was brought to Copenhagen, Denmark, by zoologist Johannes Christopher Hagemann Reinhardt. According to Ted Pietsch, a systematist and evolutionary biologist, this species — later identified as the footballfish, Himantolophus groenlandicus, or the man-gobbler — was the first anglerfish found in…

Since we perceive and sense things as people, we realize we are alive. On the other hand, scientists and great philosophers are stumped into what consciousness is and from where it comes. “Consciousness — or, to put it another way, conscious perception — is clearly a part of reality,” said Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician and…

My students and collaborators are planning a scientific conference for my 60th birthday, which will take place in about a year. “I have learned even more from my professors, more from my friends, and also the most from my students,” Rabbi Hanina said. We were all once students. Many of us have cuts and bruises…

NASA’s Operation IceBridge keeps track of the world’s shifting glaciers and ice sheets, such as Alaska’s Sheridan Glacier, photographed during a flight in August 2018. Sheridan Glacier has a floating tongue that is quickly eroding (the glacier portion that extends beyond the shoreline and floats on the water). On August 18, 2019, Iceland arranged a…

Entropy is a measurable physical property that is most often associated with a state of chaos, randomness, or ambiguity. The word and definition used in a wide range of fields, from classical thermodynamics, were first known to statistical physics’ microscopic explanation of existence and knowledge theory’s principles. Chemistry and physics, biological systems and their relationships to…