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Three years ago, on March 11, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), announced that the coronavirus that causes COVID was spreading worldwide and that the outbreak was officially a pandemic. At the time, there were more than 118,000 confirmed cases of COVID and 4,291 official deaths. “In the days […]

In 2016 a computer named AlphaGo made headlines for defeating then world champion Lee Sedol at the ancient, popular strategy game Go. The “superhuman” artificial intelligence, developed by Google DeepMind, lost only one of the five rounds to Sedol, generating comparisons to Garry Kasparov’s 1997 chess loss to IBM’s Deep Blue. Go, which involves players […]

You’ve probably seen a “Save the Whales” T-shirt before. But have you ever seen a “Save the Parasites” one? A group of researchers thinks that maybe it is time to start making them. To most of us, that might seem like a hard sell. (Maybe it is an especially hard one right now. The popular […]

Even after thousands of studies, questions still linger about one of the most common diseases unique to pregnancy: preeclampsia. This disorder leads to dangerously high blood pressure in about 5 percent of U.S. pregnancies, with significantly higher rates in Black women. And it is becoming more common. The only known cure is delivery, which creates […]

The US House of Representatives held the first in a series of public hearings on 8 March aimed at exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledged that the question of where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated has become highly politicized. But they said that both hypotheses describing […]

CLIMATEWIRE | Radical climate interventions — like blocking the sun’s rays — could alter the world’s weather patterns, potentially benefiting some regions of the world and harming others. That possibility, climate scientists say, means any research on such methods must consider those risks and involve the countries that already bear the greatest impacts from a warming […]

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As people in the U.S. prepare to set their clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, March 12, 2023, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time  to […]

Consider the possibility that all human technology started with a mistake—or at least a lack of hand-eye coordination. In pursuit of this idea, Lydia Luncz and Tomos Proffitt, both at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, traveled to an abandoned oil palm plantation near Thailand’s Phang Nga Bay and collected nut-cracking […]

This week researchers claimed to have discovered a superconducting material that can shuttle electricity with no loss of energy under near-real-world conditions. But drama and controversy behind the scenes have many worried that the breakthrough may not hold up to scientific scrutiny. “If you were to find a room-temperature, room-pressure superconductor, you’d have a completely […]

Massive wildfires that raged across southeast Australia in 2019–20 unleashed chemicals that chewed through the ozone layer, expanding and prolonging the ozone hole. A study, published today in Nature, describes how smoke combined with chlorine-containing molecules in the stratosphere — remnants of chemicals that are now banned — to cause the destruction. The Australian fires produced […]