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Magazine
In the Sept. 15 SN: The plant microbiome revolution, Parker probe’s stellar tech, the first RNAi drug approved, video fakery, a puzzling lemur fossil, how elephants dodge cancer, supersmooth desalination, really old cheese and more.
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Context
Top 10 cosmological discoveries
03/21/2014 - 09:34 Cosmology, History of ScienceTalk about making a cosmic ripple. This week’s report of gravity waves from the Big Bang is the biggest cosmological news of the century. It’s the science news equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane or F5 tornado. If the new results hold up, the understanding of the universe will have taken a bigger leap for humankind than hopping around on the moon. And the BICEP2 result will join an...
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Everlasting light
08/23/2013 - 12:41 CosmologyOn the next clear night, go outside and look up. If you’re away from city lights, you may be amazed by the darkness of the sky between the stars. But what looks like inky black isn’t really so. Even the darkest of night skies still contains the light of all the stars that ever shone.
Photons, or particles of light, are born in the nuclear...
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News
Universe is a teeny bit older than thought
03/21/2013 - 06:24 Physics, CosmologyThe universe is a little older and perhaps a bit stranger than previously thought, according to the best measurements ever taken of the radiation left over from just after the Big Bang. Presented March 21 at a press conference in Paris, the data from the Planck satellite combine to form a map of the remnant glow that largely affirms scientists' theories about the universe's early history. But...
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Inflation on Trial
07/13/2012 - 09:35 CosmologyAsk any astronomer what inflation is, and you’ll hear about the moment when the universe’s primordial fireball expanded like a balloon on steroids, smoothing and flattening its initial wrinkles before it grew into the cosmos seen today.
Now, some physicists are trying to let a little air out of that scenario.
Generally regarded as one of the most successful theories about the early...
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90th Anniversary Issue: 1990s
03/09/2012 - 12:16 Science & SocietyClimate in flux More than half a century ago, temperature records from Antarctica and the Arctic showed data “consistent with the theory that the entire world is slowly getting warmer,” Science News Letter reported. This low-grade fever began around 1900 and was believed “to amount to some two or three degrees each century” (2/28/59, p. 131). But not until the 1990s would climate...
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Mission: reveal the secrets of the universe
04/13/2011 - 14:25The Objective
For millennia, people have turned to the heavens in search of clues to nature’s mysteries. Truth seekers from ages past to the present day have found that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that countless galaxies dot the abyss of space, that an unknown form of matter and dark forces are at work in shaping the cosmos. Yet despite these heroic efforts, big...
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Tools for the mission
04/13/2011 - 14:24Hunting data
A number of instruments now operating or proposed can troll the skies or otherwise help to answer some of the most puzzling questions about the universe.
Planck A European Space Agency observatory launched in 2009, Planck is recording a more detailed picture of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, than its... -
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Timeline: Seeing better
1608 Invention of the telescope. Claimed by Dutch lensmaker Hans Lippershey, although others (including Jacob Metius and Zacharias Janssen) are also sometimes credited. GALILEO'S TELESCOPE | Istituto e Museo di Storia Della Scienza1609 Galileo improves the telescope and begins using it for astronomy, starting with lunar observations. Source: Gary Brown/Photo Researchers Inc1611...05/08/2009 - 14:11 -
News
Nobel prizes recognize things great and small
10/04/2006 - 11:20 Humans & SocietyThe 2006 Nobel prizes in the sciences were announced early this week. U.S. scientists swept the field.
Physiology or MedicineEight years after revealing a mechanism that cells use to regulate protein production, a pair of U.S. scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Andrew Fire of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Craig Mello of the...
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News
Sounds of the universe confirm Big Bang
05/31/2001 - 10:21 AstronomyThe early universe rang like a bell. Although scientists have known that for many years, they've been deaf to the full richness of that ancient ringing.
Astronomers now report the results of two experiments that tuned in the Big Bang's relic vibrations. They say that this newly detected primordial fanfare proclaims as never before that all the structures in the...