All Stories
- 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.
- Space
This is the most comprehensive X-ray map of the sky ever made
A new X-ray map of the entire sky, using data from the eROSITA telescope’s first full scan, looks deeper into space than any other of its kind.
- 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.
- Science & Society
All kinds of outbreaks, from COVID-19 to violence, share the same principles
Adam Kucharski talks about his new book ‘The Rules of Contagion,’ a timely read during the coronavirus pandemic.
- 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.
- Space
Self-destructive civilizations may doom our search for alien intelligence
A lack of signals from space may also be bad news for Earthlings.
- 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.
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Can science help create a more just society?
Editor in chief Nancy Shute writes about how science can create a more just society and how journalists and journalism needs to change for the better.
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- 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.
