All Stories
- Chemistry
Pathway pieced together to make opiates in yeast
Scientists have engineered yeast to make sugar into thebaine, a precursor to opiates such as morphine.
- Animals
A UFO would stress out a bear
Scientists need to know how animals, such as bears, react to the drones being used increasingly to study them.
- Planetary Science
Comet 67P, Rosetta spacecraft cozy up to the sun
Comet 67P is shooting off brilliant jets of gas and dust as it swings in close to the sun, giving scientists clues to the space rocks chemical composition.
- 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.
