News
- Health & Medicine
A year ago, we asked 6 questions about COVID-19. Here’s how the answers evolved
A year after launching our Coronavirus Update newsletter, we revisit the first topics we wrote about.
- Physics
A tiny gold ball is the smallest object to have its gravity measured
A gold sphere with a mass of about 90 milligrams pulled on another sphere in accordance with Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
- Health & Medicine
An experimental toothpaste aims to treat peanut allergy
By rolling an immune therapy into a toothbrushing routine, a company hopes to show its product can help build and maintain tolerance to allergens.
- Environment
The world wasted nearly 1 billion metric tons of food in 2019
A new United Nations global food waste report shows where waste can be reduced, which would decrease hunger and greenhouse gas emissions.
- Animals
A year after Australia’s wildfires, extinction threatens hundreds of species
As experts piece together a fuller picture of the scale of damage to wildlife, more than 500 species may need to be listed as endangered.
- Health & Medicine
People fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can socialize without masks, CDC says
Two weeks after their final COVID-19 shot, people can visit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancing.
- Animals
A sea slug’s detached head can crawl around and grow a whole new body
Chopped-up planarians regrow whole bodies from bits and pieces. But a sea slug head can regrow fancier organs such as hearts.
- Physics
A magnetic trap captures elusive ultracold plasma
Pinning plasma within a set of magnetic fields offers physicists a new way to study clean energy, space weather and the inner workings of stars.
- Earth
To understand how ‘night-shining’ clouds form, scientists made one themselves
A rocket, a bathtub’s worth of water and a high-altitude explosion reveal how water vapor cools the air to form shiny ice-crystal clouds.
- Astronomy
Andromeda’s and the Milky Way’s black holes will collide. Here’s how it may play out
Supermassive black holes in the Milky Way and Andromeda will engulf each other less than 17 million years after the galaxies merge, simulations show.
- Health & Medicine
COVID-19 has exacerbated a troubling U.S. health trend: premature deaths
The pandemic played into already rising death rates from obesity, drugs, alcohol and suicide.
- Health & Medicine
Most pro athletes who got COVID-19 didn’t develop heart inflammation
Few professional athletes developed heart inflammation after a bout of COVID-19, but how the findings relate to the general public isn’t clear.
