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Development of the hundreds of vaccines and therapies for COVID-19 is by no means confined to metro areas surrounding San Francisco, Boston or Washington, D.C. Borrowing from decades of experience in producing snake antivenoms, scientists, veterinarians and technicians at a scientific and technical institute in Costa Rica have labored nonstop in recent months to produce […]

Eight million metric tons of plastic waste enter the oceans every year. This equates to one garbage truck’s worth of plastic being dumped into our oceans every minute. The total weight is the equivalent of 90 aircraft carriers. On top of that, models project that by 2050, there will be more plastic by weight than […]

What does it feel like to be both alive and dead? That question irked and inspired Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in the 1960s. He was frustrated by the paradoxes arising from the vagaries of quantum mechanics—the theory governing the microscopic realm that suggests, among many other counterintuitive things, that until a quantum system is observed, […]

The Department of Energy is preparing a new set of partnerships and innovations that could help the nation’s three power grids handle a transformation in U.S. energy generation to meet lower emissions goals. One scientist summed up the challenge by saying it’s like updating a reliable 1957 Chevrolet for the complex technologies and climate-related hazards […]

Too often, the towering figures of science remain stick figures in the history books, known for their discoveries and accomplishments but not as the complicated, all-too-human people behind those achievements. The stick-figure version of Marie Curie, one of the most famous scientists of all time, describes a pioneering researcher on radioactivity who discovered two new […]

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Krauss bemoans what he sees as contemporary science’s “ideological corruption.” He blames this corruption on humanities scholars for pointing out how science can be “tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.” His complaint rests on a basic mistake. Krauss confuses what […]

1970 A Lunar “Tablespoonful” “In the broad, flat lunar maria, or ‘seas’ (such as Mare Tranquillitatis, the site of the Apollo 11 manned landing), the depths of craters that have reached bedrock indicate a regolith thickness of from five to 10 meters. Thus the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., […]

To judge by popular movies, people who live in the Brazilian Amazon are at constant risk of being attacked by huge tarantulas, squeezed to death by giant anacondas and being eaten alive by voracious piranhas. In fact, the real dangers have more to do with tropical diseases such as malaria, cholera, dengue, yellow fever and […]

Just because many businesses are open again doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. The coronavirus is still on the loose — actually surging in many locations — which means people have to make serious choices about their health all day, every day. Nothing in life is without risk, and decisions ultimately hinge on individual calculations. […]

In 2013, two mountaineers reached the top of Vulcán Llullaillaco, a 22,000-foot-tall volcano on the border of Chile and Argentina—when they saw something unexpected. Just 2000 feet below the summit, the climbers spotted a mouse scurrying across the snow. “It’s really a remarkable sighting because no one expected wild mammals to be living at an […]