The National Science Foundation (NSF) will soon begin crunching several large databases to see whether there are scientists who failed to disclose ties to foreign institutions in their grant applications. It is arguably the boldest of several steps federal research agencies are taking to comply with a new law that aims to boost U.S. technological innovation–and prevent...

Despite efforts to pivot toward renewable sources of energy, oil remains the backbone of modern society. It provides fuels for heat and transportation, and chemicals for everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals. But all these uses require separating crude oil into its various components. That separation process—which traditionally relies on heat—takes a tremendous amount of energy...

Forrest Masters, a civil engineer from the University of Florida (UF), spent much of Wednesday hunkered down at the Punta Gorda Airport near Fort Myers, Florida, as 185-kilometer-per-hour winds from Hurricane Ian lashed the building—and nearby instruments collected data. At the same time, marine ecologist Eric Milbrandt was sitting in a hotel across the state in West Palm...

Earlier this week, the pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai announced encouraging results from a clinical trial for patients with Alzheimer’s disease: a monoclonal antibody treatment, called lecanemab, reduced cognitive decline by 27% in people with early-stage Alzheimer’s compared with those on a placebo after a year and a half. Outside observers say the trial could offer hope...

EARTH SCIENCE European satellite duo will study oceans and warming The European Space Agency (ESA) last week approved the $420 million Harmony mission as the next in its Earth Explorer line of science missions, following a competition. Harmony’s two satellites will carry infrared sensors and radar receivers to observe the turbulent waves,...

A multipronged international effort has begun to pull out all the stops to launch trials of experimental Ebola vaccines in Uganda, which declared an outbreak of the deadly disease on 20 September. According to the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) update, Uganda has had 18 confirmed and 18 suspected cases of Ebola, including 23 deaths—an unusually high case fatality rate of...

Only a few years ago, the clear, shallow waters of Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon off eastern Spain that is Europe’s largest, hosted a robust population of the highly endangered fan mussel, a meter-long bivalve. But in 2016, a massive algal bloom, fueled by fertilizer washing off farm fields, sucked up the lagoon’s oxygen and killed 98% of the bivalves, along with...

Researchers in Japan and the United States take different approaches to experiments that will be physics’ next big thing

For the past decade, paleontologists have increasingly been using a unique window to peer into the past: amber—blobs of hardened tree resin—that preserves in exquisite detail insects, plants, tiny lizards, and bits of larger organisms, such as the feathered tail from a dinosaur . Recent papers have analyzed samples taken from one of the world’s richest amber...

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe in 2020, calls began to ring out for universities to swiftly address concerns that interruptions to research, closure of schools and day cares, and other disruptions could widen existing inequities in academia and make it harder for women and researchers from other underrepresented groups to stay afloat. Many universities in the United...

It’s a practice that makes some scientists cringe: The lead author of a paper pays homage to a department chair, or a colleague who helped secure a grant, by listing them among the manuscript’s authors—even though the person made no intellectual contribution to the paper. Such “honorary authorship” is discouraged by many journals, publishing industry groups, and universities,...

“Bird brain” insults be damned. The noggins of our flying friends are packed with neurons , and recent studies have shown birds can develop complex tools and even discriminate between paintings by Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso . But is this avian acumen a recent development , evolutionarily...

BALTIMORE— Second by second, as a NASA satellite hurtled toward a pile of rocks in space, scientists gathered at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University issued their unfiltered analysis. “It doesn’t look like any asteroid I’ve ever seen!” “That’s totally a rubble pile—I knew it!” “Holy shit!” In the...

Three days after Hurricane Fiona tore its way through Puerto Rico, Ileana Rodríguez-Velez arrived at her laboratory, which had lost power, not knowing what to expect. A chemist at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Humacao, Rodríguez-Velez opened a refrigerator that stores the samples of rare plants her lab studies for their potential medical uses. The inside was warm, and most of the...

Nearly 3 years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 faces a formidable challenge: finding new ways around the immunity humans have built up through vaccines and countless infections. Worrisome new data show it is up to the challenge. Several new and highly immune-evasive strains of the virus have caught scientists’ attention in recent weeks; one or more may well cause big, new COVID-19 waves...

The U.S. government overplayed its hand in prosecuting U.S. academics under the controversial China Initiative, three federal courts ruled last week. In separate cases, attorneys for the Department of Justice (DOJ) had maintained that chemist Franklin Tao, materials scientist Zhengdong Cheng, and mathematician Mingqing Xiao jeopardized the nation’s security and defrauded the...

In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature , featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a...

The Kremlin tightened its control over the 300-year-old Russian Academy of Sciences this week when its current president, Alexander Sergeev, withdrew his bid for a second term a day before the election, citing the “administrative pressures” many RAS members face for “speaking out.” The 67-year-old laser physicist, who was widely expected to win, declined to explain his withdrawal...

Former Texas A&M University, College Station, material scientist Zhengdong Cheng pleaded guilty today to two federal charges of making false statements to NASA that hid his ties to two Chinese universities. Cheng also agreed to repay NASA $86,876, funds awarded for a microgravity experiment to be conducted on the International Space Station. Despite...

TAXONOMY Bacteria naming method relies on DNA A controversial new system for naming bacteria and other prokaryotes relies only on their DNA, rather than laboratory cultures, to identify them. The approach, dubbed SeqCode and described this week in Nature Microbiology , promises to relieve a backlog created because so many...

The BRAIN Initiative, the 9-year-old, multibillion-dollar U.S. neuroscience effort, today announced its most ambitious challenge yet: compiling the world’s most comprehensive map of cells in the human brain. Scientists say the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN), funded with $500 million over 5 years, will help them understand how the human brain works and how diseases...

Now Martha Muñoz is applying that lesson to help students from diverse backgrounds

The emergence of seed-producing plants more than 300 million years ago was an evolutionary watershed, opening new environments to plants and ultimately leading to the flowering plants that brighten our world and supply much of our food. But it was less of a leap than it seems, newly published DNA sequences suggest. The genomes, from three fern species and a cycad, one of the...

In the eighth century C.E., an English monk named Bede wrote the history of the island, saying Rome’s decline in about 400 C.E. opened the way to an invasion from the east. Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes from what is today northwestern Germany and southern Denmark “came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives.” But...