News

Night skies across the U.S. danced with streaks of green and magenta this past week. People as far south as Asheville, N.C., and Phoenix, Ariz., had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing the Northern Lights. “My Twitter feed was inundated. Every femtosecond, a new picture appeared,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director of […]

Grinding up old batteries might lead to a low-energy way to recycle the lithium and other metals used in them. Lithum-ion batteries are in all our personal technology — such as phones, laptops and wireless headphones — and they power electric vehicles. Without them, our lives would look very different. The lithium in rechargeable batteries […]

An extragalactic outburst whose light hurtled through the inner solar system last fall was 70 times brighter than any other such eruption that scientists have observed, researchers report. Radiation from the explosion — a gamma-ray burst (GRB) known as GRB 221009A — swept over Earth on Oct. 9, 2022. It saturated gamma-ray detectors on multiple space telescopes, earning the nickname […]

Science has long presumed that children living in cities grow faster and healthier than rural kids—but that trend has flipped over the past two decades, a new study suggests. A global study published Wednesday in Nature found that the average height of urban children and adolescents ages 5 to 19 is now slightly shorter than […]

In 2011 Marcus Perlman saw a YouTube video of a gorilla named Zola spinning in circles while playing in a water puddle at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta. In 2017 he noticed Zola again, this time in a viral video from the Dallas Zoo in Texas. Zola whirled in a plastic blue kiddie pool as […]

I was in the third grade when I realized I couldn’t smell. My class was on a field trip to a wastewater treatment plant and while everyone around me was disgusted by the stench, I had no problem with it whatsoever. I had anosmia, the loss or impairment of the ability to smell. Many doctor […]

ChatGPT is the first nonhuman subject I have ever tested. In my work as a clinical psychologist, I assess the cognitive skills of human patients using standardized intelligence tests. So I was immediately intrigued after reading the many recent articles describing ChatGPT as having impressive humanlike skills. It writes academic essays and fairy tales, tells […]

Editor’s Note (3/27/23): Today a shooter killed at least six people, including three children, at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. This story from 2022 discusses how firearms have become the leading injury-related cause of death for children in the U.S. For much of the past few decades motor vehicle crashes were the most common […]

Editor’s Note (3/27/23): A deadly tornado struck Mississippi in the evening hours last Friday. This December 2021 story explores why tornadoes that strike at night and in the Southeast are often more fatal. It was around 9:30 P.M., hours past sunset, when a violent tornado leveled the town of Mayfield, Ky., on December 10. The […]

CLIMATEWIRE | The president of one of the world’s largest insurance brokers warned Wednesday that climate change is destabilizing the insurance industry, driving up prices and pushing insurers out of high-risk markets. Aon PLC President Eric Andersen told a Senate committee that climate change is injecting uncertainty into an industry built on risk prediction and has […]