The U.S. academic community is gearing up for a new effort to convince national policymakers that the benefits of keeping government-funded basic research out in the open—and not stamping it classified—far outweigh any threat to national security from sharing scientific findings. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,...

Some 3000 years ago, people sailed toward the sunrise—and the last swatch of our planet uninhabited by humans: remote islands of the Pacific. By 1200 C.E. societies flourished from the Marianas to Rapa Nui, more than 12,000 kilometers apart. How the Pacific gradually became home to these groups—and just where they came from—has long been a mystery ....

CONSERVATION Native tribes and United States enter park management deal The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service signed a first-of-its-kind agreement last week to comanage Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah with five Native American tribes. The five tribes have long wanted to...

The viruses that cause Zika and dengue fever can’t get from person to person on their own—they need to hitchhike inside a mosquito. A new study suggests how they hail these rides: They make their victims smell more attractive to the blood-sucking bugs. It’s "a big advance," says mosquito neuroscientist Laura Duvall of Columbia University, who wasn't connected to the...

The World Health Organization (WHO) may have very high aspirations—“the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health”—but when a new human disease begins to spread, or a known one behaves in unusual, threatening ways, it has few levers to pull. One important decision it can make, however, is declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC),...

Sea Shepherd jettisons its militant past in favor of a new focus on research

Prescriptions for Pfizer’s blockbuster drug Paxlovid have skyrocketed in recent weeks. That’s good news for many COVID-19 patients, as the pill has been proven to reduce severe disease from SARS-CoV-2 infections. But a bevy of new lab studies shows the coronavirus can mutate in ways that make it less susceptible to the drug, by far the most widely used of the two oral antiviral drugs...

When the U.S. government released a much-anticipated report on UFOs a year ago, many were perplexed that it couldn’t explain 143 of the 144 sightings it examined. (In the single closed case, the report concluded the mystery object was a large, deflating balloon.) "Where are the aliens?" cracked one headline. The truth was still out there. So was...

The burst of flavor from summer’s first sweet corn and the proud stance of a show dog both testify to the power of domestication. But so does the microbial alchemy that turns milk into cheese, grain into bread, and soy into miso. Like the ancestors of the corn and the dog, the fungi and bacteria that drive these transformations were modified for human use. And their genomes have...

Where and when dogs arose is one of the biggest mysteries of domestication . To solve it, researchers have tried everything from analyzing ancient dog bones to sequencing modern dog DNA—all with inconclusive results. Now, researchers have tried a new tack: figuring out where the ancient wolves that gave rise to dogs lived. The new study doesn’t close the case, but it...

Whether we’ve got the flu or have had too much to drink, most of us have experienced nausea. Unlike other universal sensations such as hunger and thirst, however, scientists still don’t understand the biology behind the feeling—or how to stop it. A new study in mice identifies a possible key player: specialized brain cells that communicate with the gut to turn off the feeling of...

It has been 3 months since the United Kingdom reported severe, unexplained hepatitis was sending young children to hospitals in unusual numbers. The initial handful of cases reported in Scotland on 31 March were soon joined by dozens and then hundreds, primarily from Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. As of 22 June, the global total, from 33 countries, has swollen to...

War is hell. It breaks apart families, destroys natural resources, and drives humans to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Yet according to a new analysis of human history, war may also prod the evolution of certain kinds of complex societies. The twin developments of agriculture and military technology—especially cavalries and iron weapons—have predicted the rise of empires....

In mid-January, the southern tip of South America suffered its worst heat wave in years. In Argentina, temperatures in more than 50 cities rose above 40°C, more than 10°C warmer than the typical average temperature in cities such as Buenos Aires. The scorching heat sparked wildfires, worsened a drought, hurt agriculture, and temporarily collapsed Buenos Aires’s...

A few months ago, Teresa Thurston, a cellular microbiologist at Imperial College London, could not have imagined losing her €1.5 million European research grant. But the United Kingdom’s role in the European Union’s €95 billion Horizon Europe funding program is now crumbling thanks to lingering Brexit disputes, forcing many U.K. grant winners like Thurston to give up grants they...

Chickens make more sounds than most of us realize. They cluck when content, squawk when frightened, and sing “buk, buk, ba-gawk” when laying an egg. Their chicks vocalize too, and they can vary that simple sound to signal pleasure or distress. Now, scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that automatically identifies these SOS calls, an advance that could...

The Antarctic midge might be smaller than a pea, but it’s the continent’s largest land animal–and only native insect. The midge has clearly evolved to survive in extreme conditions, yet a warming climate could threaten its existence, a new study finds. Unlike temperate-zone midges that swarm around water, the Antarctic midge ( Belgica antarctica ) is...

Ten years ago, an athletic 12-year-old from Affton, Missouri, named Mitchell Herndon began to experience muscle weakness that eventually led to him using a wheelchair. After years of visits to specialists failed to diagnose his neurological symptoms, he enrolled in a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded program that studies patients with debilitating mystery diseases. Researchers...

Alison Avenell spent years collecting evidence that Yoshihiro Sato, a now-deceased nutritional researcher in Japan, was among the most prolific fraudsters known to science. After journals investigated the findings by Avenell, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Aberdeen, and her colleagues, they retracted more than two dozen papers Sato had co-authored . Many had...

After 2 days of deliberation, an advisory panel convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded the monkeypox outbreak that has spread to more than 50 countries does not yet warrant the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), its highest alert level. WHO currently has PHEIC declarations for polio and COVID-19, and many infectious disease...

After two days of deliberation, an advisory panel convened by the World Health Organization has concluded the monkeypox outbreak that has spread to more than 50 countries does not yet warrant the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), its highest alert level. WHO currently has PHEIC declarations for polio and COVID-19,  and many infectious disease...

Five years ago, researchers from across Europe converged on a cold, fast-moving river in the highlands of Albania for a week of intensive fieldwork. Their mission: to kick off a multiyear effort to assemble a detailed ecological portrait of the Vyosa River, one of Eastern Europe’s last free-flowing waterways. They hoped to draw public attention to the river’s rich wildlife and...

Yesterday, declaring a “national incident” after poliovirus was detected in London sewage, public health officials in the United Kingdom asked physicians to be on alert for polio cases and urged residents to check whether they are up to date with their vaccinations for the now-rare disease. The source of the virus is still a mystery, but was likely someone from outside of the United...

There is no perfect parallel in Earth’s past for present-day climate change—human-driven warming is simply happening too fast and furiously. The closest analog came 56 million years ago, when over the course of 3000 to 5000 years, greenhouse gases soared in the atmosphere, causing at least 5°C of warming and pushing tropical species to the poles. The cause of the...