News
- Life
How Tiktaalik got its neck
The oldest fossil with a neck, Tiktaalik roseae, shows how animals developed a head for living on land.
By Susan Milius - Health & Medicine
Streamlined polio vaccine fights outbreaks
Back to basics: A simplified polio vaccine works better than the standard approach and overcomes an unforeseen shortcoming in the widely used oral vaccine.
By Nathan Seppa - Humans
Bypassing paralyzed nerves
Implanted electrode helps paralyzed monkey clench its forearm muscles.
- Humans
Infectious finds at ancient site
A DNA analysis of skeletons found at a submerged Israeli site produces the earliest known evidence of human tuberculosis, now known to have existed at a 9,000-year-old farming settlement.
By Bruce Bower - Life
Grunting humans, moles scare earthworms
Science tackles the old mystery of why worm grunters who rub a stake in the ground can catch earthworms.
By Susan Milius - Planetary Science
Huge cyclone churns at Saturn’s north pole
Planetary scientists have gotten their closest look yet at polar storms on the ringed planet. These polar cyclones are big enough to engulf Earth.
By Ron Cowen - Space
Hubble, heal thyself
NASA scientists are cleared to remotely switch equipment on the Hubble Space Telescope in the hopes of restoring the orbiting observatory’s function by October 16.
- Health & Medicine
Society for Neuroscience annual meeting
Daily reports from Science News staff from the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.
By Science News - Planetary Science
So close, yet so far away
Astronomers have found, in the frozen reaches beyond Neptune, two gravitationally bound objects that compose the most widely spaced binary system known in the solar system.
By Ron Cowen - Climate
Cooling climate ‘consensus’ of 1970s never was
Myth often cited by global warming skeptics debunked.
By Sid Perkins - Health & Medicine
Vitamin D deficiency
Parkinson’s disease patients are more commonly lacking in vitamin D than Alzheimer’s patients or healthy people.
By Nathan Seppa - Space
A comet doubleheader
Astronomers have discovered the first comet that appears to be a contact binary — two chunks somehow held together by a narrow neck of material.
By Ron Cowen