NASA’s New Horizons probe wowed the world in 2015 with unprecedented pictures of Pluto, and, more recently, with the first close-up images of an object in the Kuiper belt of asteroids. Now the mission has achieved yet another first: measuring the distances of two stars from the outer reaches of the Solar System. “It’s fair to […]
The mud on Roberts Bank at the southern end of the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia is deep—and smelly. Exposed at low tide, it ranges for kilometers, and looks devoid of life. But across some sections, sunlight reflects with a slightly greenish luminescence. Those places are where you see flocks of plump little brown-and-white […]
Whether portrayed by Rex Harrison, Eddie Murphy or Robert Downey, Jr., Doctor Dolittle learned to talk to animals. But in reality, science has remained some distance from solving the long-standing question of how we humans learned to talk during our evolution. Here’s one new clue: a team of researchers in Great Britain have demonstrated how […]
Roughly 8.7 million years ago, in areas that would become southern Idaho and northern Nevada, the grasslands began to break open, unleashing curtains of lava and clouds of gas and ash that rolled across the North American landscape. Within hours, if not minutes, the land would have been pummeled by black volcanic glass that rained […]
Originally published in January 1942 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Possibly veteran jumpers can describe sensations and thoughts during the brief seconds that elapse between the leap from the plane and the teeth loosening wallop that ensues when the parachute opens and applies sudden brakes to a headlong earthward plunge. But to a neophyte that brief […]
Greenhouse gas emissions are roaring back as coronavirus lockdowns lift, according to updated projections from the Global Carbon Project. Emissions in China have returned to 2019 levels—a sharp reversal from earlier this year when daily carbon dioxide levels in the country plunged by a quarter. In the United States, daily emissions were down by 7% in early […]
For 25 years, physicists have used an exotic state of matter made from ultracold atoms to probe quantum behaviour at the macroscopic scale. Now, they can do it in space. The feat—the creation of a Bose–Einstein condensate—comes from physicists behind NASA’s US$100-million Cold Atom Lab, which began operating on the International Space Station in June 2018. The […]
On April 26 Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the Nigeria Center for Disease Control, put out a desperate call on Twitter for tests that detect pieces of viral genetic material in patient samples. At that time the West African country of 196 million had tested fewer than 12,000 people for the novel coronavirus. Germany, by contrast, […]
Opioids have been blamed for the deaths of at least 400,000 U.S. residents in the past two decades—but research now shows that number could be much higher. Researchers looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on about 630,000 people who died of drug overdoses between 1999 and 2016. They separated the […]
For all the mysteries that remain about the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it causes, scientists have generated an incredible amount of fine-grained knowledge in a surprisingly short time. Thousands of different coronaviruses may inhabit the planet. Four of them are responsible for many of our common colds. Two others have already triggered alarming […]