All Stories

  1. Physics

    50 years ago, superconductors were warming up

    Superconducting temperatures have risen by about 250 degrees since the 1970s, but are still too cold to enable practical technologies.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Long COVID brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

    MRI scans of long COVID patients with brain fog suggest that the blood brain barrier may be leaky.

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  3. Animals

    Daddy longlegs look like they have two eyes. That doesn’t count the hidden ones

    Despite its two-eyed appearance, Phalangium opilio has six peepers. The four optical remnants shed light on the arachnids’ evolutionary history.

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  4. Planetary Science

    Titan’s dark dunes could be made from comets

    Saturn’s largest moon could have gotten its sands from an ancient reshuffling of the solar system. If true, that would solve a long-standing mystery.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Don’t use unsterilized tap water to rinse your sinuses. It may carry brain-eating amoebas

    Two new studies document rare cases in which people who rinsed sinuses with unsterilized tap got infected with brain-eating amoebas.

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  6. Animals

    Male dragonflies’ wax coats might protect them against a warming climate

    The reflective wax, which cools males on sunny courtship flights, may also armor them against the effects of climate change.

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  7. Animals

    Male mammals aren’t always bigger than females

    In a study of over 400 mammal species, less than half have males that are, on average, heavier than females, undermining a long-standing assumption.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    The U.S. now has a drug for severe frostbite. How does it work?

    Iloprost has been shown to prevent the need to amputate frozen fingers and toes. It’s now approved for use to treat severe frostbite in the U.S.

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  9. Animals

    A decades-old mystery has been solved with the help of newfound bee species

    Masked bees in Australia and French Polynesia have long-lost relatives in Fiji, suggesting that the bees’ ancestors island hopped.

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  10. Four years on, the COVID-19 pandemic has a long tail of grief

    Researchers are studying the magnitude and impact that grief from the COVID-19 pandemic has had and will have for years to come.

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  11. Animals

    Big monarch caterpillars don’t avoid toxic milkweed goo. They binge on it

    Instead of nipping milkweed to drain the plants’ defensive sap, older monarch caterpillars may seek the toxic sap. Lab larvae guzzled it from a pipette.

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  12. Space

    ‘Space: The Longest Goodbye’ explores astronauts’ mental health

    The documentary follows NASA astronauts and the psychologists helping them prepare for future long-distance space trips to the moon and Mars.

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