All Stories
- Environment
Common, cheap ingredients can break down some ‘forever chemicals’
Forever chemicals, or PFAS, are harmful compounds that are very difficult to degrade. But some are no match for lye and dimethyl sulfoxide.
- Animals
Why mosquitoes are especially good at smelling you
How Aedes aegypti mosquitoes smell things is different from how most animals do, making hiding human odors from the insects more complicated.
- Planetary Science
Oort cloud comets may spin themselves to death
How icy objects from the solar system’s fringe break up as they near the sun is a long-standing mystery. One astronomer now thinks he has an answer.
- Health & Medicine
The first known monkeypox infection in a pet dog hints at spillover risk
A person passed monkeypox to a dog. Other animals might be next, allowing the virus to set up shop outside of Africa for the first time.
- Particle Physics
Protons contain intrinsic charm quarks, a new study suggests
The massive quarks — counterintuitively heavier than the proton itself — might carry about 0.6 percent of a proton’s momentum.
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Two new books show how sexism still pervades astronomy
In A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman and The Sky Is for Everyone, female astronomers recount how sexism has affected their careers.
- Physics
Spiraling footballs wobble at one of two specific frequencies
Researchers simulated the path of a flying football to study how pigskins wobble and why they drift sideways.
- Planetary Science
Asteroid impacts might have created some of Mars’ sand
Roughly a quarter of the Red Planet’s sand is spherical bits of glass forged in violent impacts, new observations reveal.
- Space
Over time, Betelgeuse changed color. Now it’s also lost its rhythm
A recent upset to the star’s variability and ancient records that describe the red star as yellow tell a tale of a star that is no stranger to change.
- Particle Physics
Physicists spotted rare W boson trios at the Large Hadron Collider
By measuring how often triplets of particles called W bosons appear, scientists can check physics’ standard model for any cracks.
- Health & Medicine
COVID-19 infections can rebound for some people. It’s unclear why
Rebounding COVID-19 isn’t limited to Paxlovid patients. An infection can come back even for people not given the drug.
- Health & Medicine
50 years ago, scientists hoped freezing donor organs would boost transplants
In the 1970s, biologists hoped to freeze organs so more could last long enough to be transplanted. Scientists are now starting to manage this feat.
