Over the past few months, the phrase “social distancing” has entered our lexicon. Many of us have found ourselves separated from family and friends—or at least from our normal social lives. As humans grapple with pandemic-induced isolation, science is starting to offer insight into what may be happening in our brains when our social contact with […]
If there were an app on your phone that could improve your memory, would you try it? Who wouldn’t want a better memory? After all, our recollections are fragile and can be impaired by diseases, injuries, mental health conditions and, most acutely for all of us, aging. A multibillion-dollar industry for brain training already capitalizes […]
As the U.S. continues to grapple with the novel coronavirus pandemic, another infectious respiratory disease is already looming: influenza. Flu season typically begins around November in the northern hemisphere, and the combined burden of the illness and COVID-19 could overwhelm hospitals and testing sites. The good news is that a safe and effective flu vaccine […]
The historic first image of a black hole unveiled last year has now been turned into a movie. The short sequence of frames shows how the appearance of the black hole’s surroundings changes over years as its gravity stirs the material around it into a constant maelstrom. The images show a lopsided blob of light swirling around […]
Artificial intelligence still needs to bridge the “sim-to-real” gap. Deep-learning techniques that are all the rage in AI log superlative performances in mastering cerebral games, including chess and Go, both of which can be played on a computer. But translating simulations to the physical world remains a bigger challenge. A robot named Curly that uses “deep […]
For decades, scientists have treated Venus as Earth’s estranged sister gone bad. Once considered a promising planetary destination because of its near equivalence to our own world in size and mass, robotic scouts revealed Venus to be a pressure-cooked globe inimical to life—and to any further efforts to explore it. Now, however, hints of a […]
The question of whether we can be reinfected with COVID-19 has been resolved. In August, genome sequencing confirmed that a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong had indeed been infected by the same virus a second time. So too was the case for a 25-year-old man in the United States, though the originating case study has […]
China pledged yesterday to stop releasing carbon emissions before 2060 in a surprise move that catapults it ahead of U.S. ambitions on climate change and instantly raised questions about whether it can radically alter its status as the world’s top emitter within 40 years. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s announcement at the U.N. General Assembly won […]
In a vast, unintentional public health experiment, millions of U.S. college students have descended on campuses to begin their fall semester with an unwelcome new arrival: the novel coronavirus. Severe COVID-19 outbreaks have already forced some campuses to close and move instruction online. Others have been fending off a surge in cases by relentlessly testing […]
Asian elephants, the largest land mammals on the continent, can weigh as much as a forklift. This suggests they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Yet somehow, the team from the Andhra Pradesh forest service couldn’t seem to locate the elephants that had lately been causing havoc—lumbering through villagers’ rice paddies, sugarcane fields, and banana […]