All Stories
- Health & Medicine
Overheard, baby edition: Making sense of new words
Eavesdropping babies learn new words when they understand familiar ones.
- Health & Medicine
Second wave of bird flu ups pandemic worries
The H7N9 avian influenza virus, which first appeared in 2013, is sweeping China with a second, larger wave of illness.
- Earth
How the Chicxulub impact made acid rain
Using lasers to accelerate materials to asteroid-like impact velocities, scientists have shown how the Chicxulub asteroid impact, which happened roughly 65 million years ago, could have created a mass extinction in the oceans.
- Life
Acid-bath method for making stem cells under fire
No one has been able to reproduce a new technique for creating stem cells called STAP cells, leading some researchers to call for the retraction of the original research papers.
- Planetary Science
Feedback
Readers respond to a special report on neuroscience and discuss moon dust.
- Health & Medicine
MS milder when patients begin with higher vitamin D levels
Multiple sclerosis patients with low concentrations of vitamin D early in their disease have more nerve damage several years later.
- Climate
Warm, wet weather may have helped Genghis Khan rule
Mild, wet weather — not drought — may have helped Genghis Khan expand the Mongolian empire to the largest in human history.
- Animals
Elephants can tell men’s voices from women’s
Amboseli elephants may pick out age and gender — and even distinguish between languages — when listening to human voices.
- Physics
Shifting grains may explain earthquake lightning
Mysterious lightning before or during earthquakes could get its spark from underground shifting.
- Animals
Spotted seals hear well in and out of water
Spotted seals, native to the northern parts of the Pacific, hear frequencies that may mean they are susceptible to the effects of anthropogenic noise.
- Materials Science
Phosphorene introduced as graphene alternative
Sheets of ultrathin phosphorus could lead to faster semiconductor electronics.
- Cosmology
Gravitational wave detection a big day for the Big Bang
On a snowy St. Patrick’s Day, our offices officially shut down by a late-winter storm, the Science News staff was abuzz over the biggest thing since the Higgs boson. On March 17, scientists announced the first direct evidence of the theory of cosmic inflation: primordial gravitational waves.
