New winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam for video of a roundworm and single-celled Dileptus. Credit: Nguyen Nam Nhat. Last month we covered the winner of Nikon’s Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video captured tiny cilia beating in the airways…
Hamilton also coined the term “software engineering” and founded two successful software companies. Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term “software engineering” and led the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, died last week at the age of 90. A recipient of the Presidential…
Getting a glass bead to act like a quantum object by entangling it with light. Writing about quantum entanglement is always a challenge. There are so many clichés to avoid: It’s mysterious, ghostly, spooky, and weird. Entanglement is none of those things, and yet it is also all of…
Altering molecular handedness has implications for the origins of life. Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed “handedness”—they’re chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50 mix of the left- and right-handed forms of a…
“We are in the era of people interested in having good deals, and LISA is a very good deal for the US.” It’s no surprise that NASA’s new tack toward foreign partnerships—good deals only, please—is challenging preconceived notions of international cooperation in space. Without a massive budget hike, the US…
To date, this Atlantic tropics year has been exceptionally quiet. A low-pressure system in the western Gulf of Mexico should soon become a tropical storm, and based on the latest forecast modeling, it has a decent chance of becoming a hurricane. Normally, a hurricane forming in early October would…
Francis Halzen of University of Wisconsin-Madison led development of IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Halzen spearheaded…
The entire field of optogenetics traces back to light-seeking algae. Over decades of research, scientists have built up a partial picture of what specialized cells within the brain and spinal cord do. By studying how the brain develops, they could identify genes that were active in different populations of…
Fresh analysis of First Dynasty mass burials finds signs of fatal blunt force trauma on 39 percent of skulls Egyptologists have long debated whether the earliest pharoahs of the First Dynasty were buried with various servants and officials to serve them in the afterlife—a form of human sacrifice. But…
Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners, Loki) narrates NatGeo’s new documentary Africa: Earth’s Wild Home Chimps fish for algae in a rare example of primate tool use. Credit: National Geographic A wild African black panther prowls for prey. An orphaned baby pangolin must learn how to climb on its own. And a…
