News

In just a few years, news specials and academic papers will mark 100 years since the start of the Great Depression. Archival photographs will be dusted off to display the restive crowds gathering outside bank doors in desperate attempts to collect their life savings. A kind of dress rehearsal for the coming commemorations took place […]

Scientists have uncovered new genetic evidence from the market in Wuhan, China, where COVID cases first clustered in late 2019. The findings add support to an animal origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. They were presented to an advisory group convened by the World Health Organization earlier this week. Florence Débarre, an evolutionary […]

A loose raft of brown seaweed spanning about twice the width of the U.S. is inching across the Caribbean. Currently, bucketloads of the buoyant algae are washing up on beaches on the eastern coast of Florida earlier in the year than usual, raising scientists’ concerns for what coming months will bring. The seaweed is made […]

Tech research company OpenAI has just released an updated version of its text-generating artificial intelligence program, called GPT-4, and demonstrated some of the language model’s new abilities. Not only can GPT-4 produce more natural-sounding text and solve problems more accurately than its predecessor. It can also process images in addition to text. But the AI […]

The Texas State Board of Education altered its internal guidance to schools last month to emphasize the “positive” aspects of fossil fuels in science textbooks. The changes are raising concerns among scientists, education experts and other board members that the panel is establishing policies that could lead to the statewide purchase of textbooks that undermine […]

CLIMATEWIRE | Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Biden administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow project, marking a new stage in the fight over drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The hotly contested $8 billion project opens three new drilling areas in the remote wilderness of Alaska’s western North Slope and is estimated to be capable […]

The moon crashing into Earth may sound like an unrealistic doomsday scenario or the stuff of sci-fi disasters. But for some planets in other star systems, such catastrophic collisions may be common. New research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyuses computer simulations to show that collisions between exoplanets and their moons (called […]

The harnessed power of the subatomic world could soon upend the modern computing industry. Quantum computers are all over the news, and fundamental work on the theory that gave rise to them even won last year’s Nobel Prize. But the one place you might not hear about them is inside a physics classroom. And if […]

For the first time, the U.S. government has proposed limits on toxic “forever chemicals” in the nation’s drinking water. Compounds in this class of chemicals, known scientifically as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), have a strong carbon-fluorine bond. That means they don’t readily break down under ambient environmental conditions—and it is suspected that they can […]

For the first time, the U.S. government has proposed limits on toxic “forever chemicals” in the nation’s drinking water. Compounds in this class of chemicals, known scientifically as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), have a strong carbon-fluorine bond. That means they don’t readily break down under ambient environmental conditions—and it is suspected that they can […]