Tag: SCIENCE

This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Struggling to keep my balance, I teeter along a narrow plankway that wends through the rolling foothills near Denali National Park and Preserve. Just ahead, Northern Arizona University ecologist Ted Schuur, a lanky 6-footer, leads the way to Eight Mile Lake, his research…

The giant hogweed is hard to miss. The monstrous plant towers up to 15 feet tall, with a crown of white flowers the size of an umbrella. They burst into bloom between the last week of June and the first week of July—just in time to be the perfect dramatic backdrop to red-white-and-blue-themed parties. But…

Behold the rainbow innards of a mouse, the first creature to be x-rayed in 3D color. Traditionally, you’d see only bone illumined among the fleshy bits. But the MARS scanner, armed with particle-detecting tech used in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, counts individual photons bouncing through the body, tracking their energy levels to calculate the varying…

Sports teams collect sweat to analyze athlete performance, while companies market sweat replacement drinks and sweat-removal clothing to help keep sprinters, cyclists, and tennis players happy. But so far, swimmers have been left high and dry. Today a team of researchers announced they have built a small, flexible, wireless sensor that sticks to a swimmer’s…

“The Falcon has landed.” As SpaceX declared victory on its live webcast, cheers erupted on a Southern California hilltop, where a group had gathered to witness the company’s latest rocket launch (and landing). SpaceX had just achieved another first: touching down a rocket on California soil. Until now, the company’s West Coast landings had all…

Hopes were running high for cow 401, and cow 401 serenely bore the weight of expectations. She entered the cattle chute obligingly, and as the vet searched her uterus, making full use of the plastic glove that covered his arm up to his shoulder, she uttered nary a moo. A week ago, Cow 401 and…

Scientists in the US may be out in front developing the next generation of Crispr-based genetic tools, but it’s China that’s pushing those techniques toward human therapies the fastest. Chinese researchers were the first to Crispr monkeys, and non-viable embryos, and to stick Crispr’d cells into a real live human. And now, a team of…

For weeks, computer scientist Siwei Lyu had watched his team’s deepfake videos with a gnawing sense of unease. Created by a machine learning algorithm, these falsified films showed celebrities doing things they'd never done. They felt eerie to him, and not just because he knew they’d been ginned up. “They don’t look right,” he recalls…

Six months after the first case of Ebola was confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s conflict-torn border province of North Kivu, the outbreak is still raging, leaving a trail of fractured families and hundreds of orphans in its wake. As of December 20, more than 512 cases have been confirmed and 288 people have…

In 1995, New York City psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg logged onto PsyCom.net, then a popular message board for shrinks, to describe a new disease he called "internet addiction disorder," symptoms of which, he wrote, included giving up important social activities because of internet use and "voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers." It was supposed…