A new book looks into the long history of people who have opposed vaccines. Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill.” How could we…
Peer review now optional, political staff would screen grants for forbidden topics. Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the…
They seem to reorganize their tissues and then just keep living. Organs, arms, appendages, and other complex tissues usually decay rapidly when they’re separated from their host. Over the years, biologists have seen some success with keeping them alive outside of the body—organ transplants depend on it—but it has…
If it scales up, it can help us diversify our sources of a key element. While we make batteries based on many different chemistries, nothing has approached the massive scale at which we can produce lithium batteries. That scale makes the economics of lithium-ion batteries hard to compete with.…
Amazon is turning a corner with its launch providers, but ULA’s Vulcan remains grounded. It was less than two months ago that the third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket left a customer’s payload in an unusable orbit. Investigators have now identified the cause of the failure,…
Iron-rich immune cells in the liver may act as sensors for magnetic fields, serving as an internal compass. Scientists have long known that migrating birds and homing pigeons navigate in part by sensing the Earth’s magnetic fields, especially at night or in overcast conditions when visual landmarks or sunshine…
Forecasters say expected El Niño should temper hurricanes in Atlantic, urge preparedness. Forecasters are calling for below-average activity this hurricane season, which begins Monday, June 1. The National Weather Service is predicting eight to 14 named storms, including three to six hurricanes and one to three major hurricanes of…
The black hole accounts for over two-thirds the mass of the object it inhabits. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to give us the ability to look at one of the earliest periods in the evolution of the Universe, a time when some of the earliest stars…
“We aren’t trading speed for scale; we are demanding both,” says the military’s program manager. SpaceX has won a lucrative contract to provide the US military with a means of distributing space-based sensing and targeting data, forming the “backbone” of a rearchitected network after separate Pentagon initiatives stalled, officials…
Getting carbon and sulfur into Earth’s interior may be part of oxygen’s story. Planet Earth has some pretty great qualities going for it. (Negative reviews mostly revolve around the staff and clientele.) Pretty high on the list of positives is a richly oxygenated atmosphere. But that’s something that evolved…
