The storm literally snapped the bones in their wings. One hundred and fifty million years ago, the Solnhofen Limestones of Germany were covered in small islands and warm saltwater lagoons. Coral reefs flourished with crinoids, sponges, jellyfish, and crustaceans; Dragonflies buzzed above the water as small reptiles sunned themselves…
A vaccine developer and a climate scientist walk into a bar write a book. We’re about a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Summers across the global north are now defined by flash floods, droughts, heat waves, uncontainable wildfires, and intensifying named storms, exactly as predicted by…
It’s a bit like a handheld 3D printer, with all the accuracy challenges that implies. Most guns are tools for doing harm, but a team of American and Korean scientists has developed one that does the opposite, helping to patch up bone injuries. It comes a bit short of…
Letter urges Congress to take action to safeguard integrity of independent peer-review system. Last month, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. In general, the executive order inserts a layer of political control over both the announcement of…
A new genetic technique lets museum samples track population dynamics. In late 2017, a study by Krefeld Entomological Society looked at protected areas across Germany and discovered that two-thirds of the insect populations living in there had vanished over the last 25 years. The results spurred the media to…
“Russia and China already occupy important strategic hills and mountains in space.” Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said Thursday that it’s time for his country to consider putting “offensive capabilities” in space after revealing Russian spacecraft are tracking two communications satellites used by the German military. Speaking at the…
Drug patents frequently cite research that the NIH wouldn’t be able to fund. The proposed federal budget would see drastic cuts made to most of the agencies that fund science. The sheer magnitude of the cuts—including a 40 percent slashing of money going to the National Institutes of Health—would…
An AI figures out how robots can get jobs done without getting in each other’s way. A lot of the stuff we use today is largely made by robots—arms with multiple degrees of freedom positioned along conveyor belts that move in a spectacle of precisely synchronized motions. All this…
NatGeo documentary Cleopatra’s Final Secret chronicles archaeologist Kathleen Martinez’s 20-year search Doomed Egyptian queen Cleopatra has captured the imaginations of people all over the world for centuries. Archaeologists have long sought to locate her tomb, which she shared with her lover, Mark Antony, per popular legend. Thus far, the…
“It’s like a bus. You wait for one and then three come at the same time.” Scientists loaded three missions worth nearly $1.6 billion on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for launch Wednesday, toward an orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, to measure the supersonic stream of charged…
