Every day, we scour the news to bring you the science stories that matter
CLIMATEWIRE | Nearly a million bats are killed each year in the United States by colliding with spinning wind turbines, prompting the Energy Department to give scientists millions of dollars to find ways to minimize bat casualties. As the United States seeks to expand wind energy to reduce carbon emissions and minimize climate impacts, land-based wind …
Wind Energy Could Get Safer for Bats with New Research Read More »
A mysterious structure nearly 1 billion light-years across has been found in our cosmic neighborhood, and it could be a relic from the Big Bang. The structure, consisting of a group of galaxies clustered around a gigantic spherical void just 820 million light-years from the Milky Way, has been named Ho’oleilana, a name inspired by the …
[CLIP: Hubble Cantata] Jason Drakeford: It’s 2016, and we’re in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. A live orchestra and choir perform opera music while thousands of people press tiny cardboard boxes to their faces. This is the Hubble Cantata. Timmy Broderick: Yeah, so these virtual reality headsets are pretty jank, but the scenes the audience is looking …
Song of the Stars, Part 1: Transforming Space into Symphonies Read More »
More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. …
Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? Read More »
“He paid no attention to persons around him. When taken into a room, he completely disregarded the people and instantly went for objects, preferably those that could be spun.” With this memorable description of his first autistic patient in 1943, a five-year boy he called “Donald T.,” child psychiatrist Leo Kanner established a template for …
Autism, Human Connection and the 'Double Empathy' Problem Read More »
What happens when matter transitions from one phase to another—a solid to a liquid or a liquid to a gas? Describing these critical points precisely, in solvable mathematical terms, is no simple feat. And for theoretical physicist John Cardy, work in this area has led to insights into everything from the way fluids percolate through …
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the most recent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine on August 21, it became the first vaccine that had been developed specifically to be given during pregnancy to protect the baby after birth to receive the go-ahead. But it’s not the first vaccine that the Centers for Disease …
If You're Pregnant, These Vaccines Could Save Your and Your Baby's Life Read More »
UTAH TEST AND TRAINING RANGE–Yes, it came from outer space. An extraterrestrial express delivery package from afar has landed safe and sound on Earth, bringing a multimillion-mile journey billions of years in the making to an end—and marking a new beginning in studies of the solar system’s history. Gathered from the eons-old near-Earth asteroid Bennu …
OSIRIS-REx's Asteroid Samples Are Finally Down to Earth Read More »
On a July day in 2021 that would become blazing hot, dozens of community volunteers gathered before sunrise at the Scrap Exchange, a reuse center for art materials in Durham, N.C. Using heat-sensing instruments, they fanned out along prescribed routes through the city, collecting data on air temperature and humidity in the morning, afternoon and …
Discrimination Has Trapped People of Color in Unhealthy Urban 'Heat Islands' Read More »
The two most famous prizes in the world are the Academy Award for work in film and the Nobel Prize for work in science and medicine. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences grants posthumous awards for people who won in their category but died before they could attend the ceremony and, occasionally, for …
Rosalind Franklin Deserves a Posthumous Nobel Prize for Co-discovering DNA Structure Read More »
