All Stories
- Animals
Light pollution may disrupt firefly sex
Females of a common big dipper firefly weren’t as flashy when forced to flirt in LED light pollution.
- Animals
Cougars may provide a net benefit to humans
Cougars have disappeared from the eastern United States. If they returned, they’d kill deer, preventing many car crashes, scientists find.
- Neuroscience
Shifting views of brain cells, and other fresh perspectives
The details emerging from the latest work on glial cells are sure to yield more insights as scientists continue their struggle to understand the mind.
- Astronomy
Lucy’s new neighbor, downloading New Horizon’s data and more reader feedback
Readers discuss why Pluto's data will take so long to get to Earth, the role the cerebellum plays in creative thinking and more.
- Chemistry
Automated chemistry could build better drugs fast and cheap
Automated molecular synthesis may win over chemists who are not convinced that more technology in drug design is better.
- Health & Medicine
Football games come with more head hits than practices do
As football intensifies from practice to games, the number of impacts increases, a new study finds.
- Genetics
How an octopus’s cleverness may have evolved
Scientists have sequenced the octopus genome, revealing molecular similarities to mammals.
- Particle Physics
Antimatter doesn’t differ from charge-mass expectations
An experiment with unprecedented precision finds that protons and antiprotons have the same ratio of charge to mass, which is consistent with theories but disappoints many physicists.
- Physics
3-D printed device cracks cocktail party problem
A plastic disk does what sophisticated computers cannot: solve the cocktail party problem.
- Science & Society
Monster fish, forensics and space exploration on display
Exhibits and opera infuse science into their experience.
- Health & Medicine
Building standards aren’t to blame for chilly offices
A recent study made headlines for finding differences between men and women in comfort level for heating and cooling. But that’s not why women are cold in the office.
- Planetary Science
New exoplanet: Big Earth or small Neptune?
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered a “cousin” of Earth 1,400 light-years away. But even though the new planet bears many similarities to Earth, experts say much about it remains a mystery.
