The patient was a success story, his advanced melanoma erased by a popular new cancer treatment. Known as immune checkpoint inhibitors, the drugs coax the immune system to seek and destroy cancer cells—and in this case, they “worked beautifully,” says Kerry Reynolds, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) who helped care for the man. But about a month after...

During the late Triassic period, when the terrestrial world was a single sprawling land mass called Pangaea, a dog-size plant-eating dinosaur perished near a river in the southern part of the continent. When the river flooded, its body was buried by sediment, with some bones still articulated as in life. About 230 million years later, paleontologist Chris Griffin, then a doctoral...

Inspired by the record-fast creation of messenger RNA vaccines that blunted the impact of COVID-19, a philanthropist is providing AU$250 million ($172 million) over 20 years to try the same with therapeutics during future pandemic threats. The donation will fund a research center in Melbourne that will develop technologies to quickly create antiviral treatments such as monoclonal...

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines look set to receive an update. Boosters reformulated to protect against the Omicron variant, which has dominated globally since early this year, may get deployed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as early as this month. The United Kingdom has already authorized a shot produced by vaccinemaker Moderna against...

Anthropologists have long celebrated and puzzled over humans’ ability to cooperate. Our special talent lies in forming nested cooperative networks that involve unrelated individuals: family, community, city, state, nation, and allied nations. Not even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, does this. But over the past 4 decades, researchers have shown that another animal does: the...

One of the three inventions claimed by Moderna in a legal battle that has erupted over the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines against COVID-19 was actually patented years earlier by two university scientists. In a complaint filed on 26 August in a U.S. district court in Massachusetts, Moderna accuses Pfizer and its partner BioNTech of “co-opting Moderna’s patented...

A decadeslong battle over how best to provide public access to the fruits of research funded by the U.S. government has taken a major turn. President Joe Biden’s administration announced yesterday that, by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed...

Rochelle Walensky walked into a hot mess when she took the helm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in January 2021. Then head of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, Walensky was an HIV/AIDS clinician and researcher who specialized in cost-effectiveness studies and oversaw fewer than 80 physicians. She took over an agency with a $15...

Science fact-checks the Fox host’s rant against “Saint Tony,” who announced his retirement on Monday

Astronomers have found carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere of a Saturn-size planet 700 light-years away—the first unambiguous detection of the gas in a planet beyond the Solar System. The discovery, made by the James Webb Space Telescope , provides clues to how the planet formed. The result also shows just how quickly Webb may identify a spate of other...

Few places have shaped Eurasian history as much as the ancient Near East. Agriculture and some of the world’s first civilizations were born there, and the region was home to ancient Greeks, Troy, and large swaths of the Roman Empire. “It’s absolutely central, and a lot of us work on it for precisely that reason,” says German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Svend...

ARCHAEOLOGY Drought exposes ‘Spanish Stonehenge’ for study Scientists are rushing to examine a 7000-year-old stone circle in central Spain that had been drowned by a reservoir for decades and was uncovered after the drought plaguing Europe lowered water levels. Nicknamed the “Spanish Stonehenge”—although 2000 years older than the U.K....

These tiny crustaceans turned a defense mechanism into a mating strategy akin to summer’s lightning bugs

Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing, manyeyed giant of Greek mythology, is about to take physical form in the mountains of North Carolina. In October, an array of 38 small telescopes will begin monitoring a slice of visible sky 1700 times the size of the full Moon. Known as the Argus Array Pathfinder, it will register changes in the stars second by second, essentially making a nightlong...

Europe and many other parts of the world are currently grappling with extreme drought—and that could be bad news for efforts to curb climate change, concludes a new global study of how shrubs and grasses respond to parched conditions. Grasslands and shrublands cover more than 40% of Earth’s terra firma, and they remove hefty amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. But by...

An ancient leg bone found near the famed skull of a human ancestor is providing new evidence that our lineage may have been walking upright 7 million years ago. A partial thighbone and two lower arm bones from Chad’s Djurab Desert suggest a species known as Sahelanthropus tchadensis ambled along on two legs, as well as spending some time in the trees, according to a...

Up to one-sixth of the tree species found in the continental United States face possible extinction, yet only a handful enjoy federal protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, a new study finds. The study, which focused on 881 tree species native to the continental United States, drew on field data indicating where trees occur and scientific literature detailing...

The storm began somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, as disturbances high and low in the atmosphere united into a full-fledged cyclone. One day later, the vast spiral of winds had grown nearly as big as Mongolia. It was on a beeline for Svalbard, the archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, and heading for the thin floes girding the Arctic’s vulnerable pack of summer sea ice....

When an outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza spread across North America this spring, researchers hoped for a replay of what happened after a different avian flu variant arrived in the United States in December 2014. Although more than 50 million birds died or were destroyed in a matter of months, costing farmers more than $1.6 billion, the virus had essentially vanished by...

Anthony Fauci, the renowned physician-scientist who has led the $6.3 billion National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly 4 decades and since early 2020 has been the U.S. government’s voice of scientific reason during the COVID-19 pandemic, will step down from government service in December. Fauci, 81, had said in recent interviews...

On Christmas Day 1859, a shipment of 24 rabbits arrived in Melbourne, Australia, from England. The bunnies were a gift for Thomas Austin, a wealthy English settler who aimed to establish a colony of the creatures on his Australian estate. He accomplished that—and then some. Just 3 years later, thousands of his European rabbits ( Oryctolagus cuniculus ) were...

When the University of Cambridge broke ground on a museum renovation in 2017, it uncovered the remains of dozens of medieval friars. Dating as far back as 1290, many skeletons still sported the weathered belt buckles—the corroded remnants of the friar burial garb. They also sported evidence of something far more insidious: the eggs of parasitic worms that potentially wreaked havoc on...

IN FOCUS Scientists rallied outside Canada’s Parliament on 11 August, carrying a 70-meter-long letter with more than 7000 signatures. The letter to lawmakers calls for increases in the stipends paid by graduate student scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. “We can’t do science if we...

There’s finally hope for a simple, cheap way to destroy a class of ubiquitous environmental toxins found in shampoos, fast-food wrappers, and fire-dousing foams. A common ingredient in soap, mixed with water and an organic solvent, readily degrades per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they can stick around in the environment for...