News

CLIMATEWIRE | It’s not easy to talk about climate change and carbon-free power when your country is a battlefield. That’s the hard reality environmental advocates and clean energy companies have confronted in Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion. But they say renewable energy has nonetheless gained wider public support as a reliable power source […]

Few threats are more damaging to a vineyard or citrus grove than a blight of sharpshooters. The half-inch-long insects are destructive agricultural pests because of their unquenchable thirsts and splashy bathroom habits: when nature calls, these bugs launch droplets of their watery pee and create puddles of disease-causing waste. Because their diet is mostly water, […]

CLIMATEWIRE | A panel of climate experts convened by the United Nations is calling for international regulations to extend into the stratosphere. The recommendation — detailed in a report released Monday — could help manage the risks associated with spraying sunlight-reflecting aerosols dozens of miles above the Earth’s surface. Such stratospheric aerosol injection is largely untested and potentially […]

On balance, science tends to follow a slow and incremental path: new observations build on previous findings, often over many years, contributing piecemeal to a larger body of knowledge. But every now and then, insights arise that can dramatically accelerate our understanding of a given subject or take the field in unexpected directions. In this […]

CLIMATEWIRE | There’s a growing consensus among climate scientists that in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming, humanity has to find a way to sequester carbon dioxide — and most efforts to date have focused on removing CO2 from the atmosphere. But two ongoing efforts — including one from the Massachusetts Institute of […]

This is Science, Quickly, a podcast from Scientific American. I’m Stefano Montali.  If I asked you to visualize, say, Harry Potter, you’d probably have no problem picturing him in your mind: a teenage wizard with black hair, glasses, a thunderbolt-shaped scar on his forehead and a wand in his hand. It would almost be as […]

A 53-year-old man in Germany has become at least the third person with HIV to be declared clear of the virus after a procedure that replaced his bone marrow cells with HIV-resistant stem cells from a donor. For years, antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been given to people with HIV with the aim of lowering the […]

Nobody expected them. They were not supposed to be there. And now, nobody can explain how they had formed.  Galaxies nearly as massive as the Milky Way and full of mature red stars seem to be dispersed in deep field images obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) during its early observation campaign, and they are […]

White House Press Secretary: There is no, again, no, indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity. News Host: Pentagon officials were grilled on Capitol Hill about why they waited so long to shoot it down. Reporter: Ben, the Pentagon is declining to describe these recent objects as balloons. Bushwick: As you might have heard, there have been some foreign […]

We’re all familiar with muscle conditioning or deconditioning that happens in response to exercise or lack of it. But when an active lifestyle—or, by contrast, that of a couch potato—is sustained over evolutionary timescales stretching for thousands or millions  of years, that leads to dramatic changes in muscle mass, metabolism and even an animal’s biochemistry. […]