All Stories
- Astronomy
Early Mars couldn’t hold liquid water long
Small rocks hit Mars 3.6 billion years ago, suggesting an early atmosphere too thin for liquid water to hang around very long.
- Chemistry
How urine will get us to Mars
A new recycling system turns pee into drinking water and energy, a small step toward really long-term space travel.
- Particle Physics
Exotic particle packs a foursome of quarks
Tetraquarks could help physicists understand the universe’s first generations of matter.
- Life
How cells keep from popping
The protein SWELL1 stops cells from swelling so much that they burst, a new study shows.
- Animals
Lionfish grow wary after culling
Efforts to control invasive lionfish could make them more difficult to catch.
- Genetics
Five mutations could make bird flu spread easily
Handful of alterations can turn H5N1 bird flu into virus that infects ferrets through the air.
- Cosmology
Galaxy’s gamma-ray glow may expose dark matter
An excess of gamma rays at the center of the Milky Way could be a signature of dark matter.
- Life
In a crisis, fruit flies do stunt turns
An elaborate monitoring system reveals that fruit flies can execute sophisticated flying maneuvers in the face of danger.
- Neuroscience
Smell wiring gets set early
Mess with a baby mouse’s olfaction for too long and neurons never recover.
- Quantum Physics
Robert Redford film foretold Shor’s quantum computing bombshell
Twenty years ago, Peter Shor showed how quantum computers could break secret codes, turning the movie Sneakers from fiction to fact.
- Earth
Huge space rock rattled Earth 3 billion years ago
An asteroid almost as wide as Rhode Island may have plowed into Earth 3.26 billion years ago, leaving its mark in South Africa’s Barberton greenstone belt.
- Computing
App could cut jet lag short
A new app calculates lighting schedules to help travelers adjust quickly to new time zones.
