Since April 2019, a fridge-size instrument attached to the International Space Station (ISS) has tickled the treetops of much of the planet with laser light, mapping forests’ carbon stores and the wildlife habitat they provide. Yet in early 2023, the laser is set to be jettisoned into Earth’s atmosphere, where it will burn up unless NASA approves a plan to extend its tenure....
In February 2019, the 60-meter-long South Korean fishing vessel Oyang 77 slipped into Argentinian waters and deployed its trawl nets, hauling in more than 140 tons of hake, skate, and squid. The ship did not have permission to fish those waters, according to Argentine officials, and to avoid detection the crew turned off a beacon that sends a vessel’s precise location via...
Fatty and abundant, herring have fed humans for centuries—and perhaps even longer than that. A new genetic study of modern and ancient herring bones suggests humans have been trading the fish across long distances since Viking times—and we’ve been overfishing them for nearly as long. This is the first research to comprehensively show how herring populations in the Baltic...
In the 1930s, a 23-year-old Black man was admitted to City Hospital #2 in St. Louis and, according to his death certificate, died of pneumonia shortly after. Without his consent—or his family’s—his deidentified body was included in one of the United States’s most studied collections of human remains , the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Skeletal Collection, which is now...
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been observing for less than 4 months, but already a storm is brewing over access to its data. Webb images and spectra all end up in an archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, yet most of them aren’t freely available until 1 year after the data were collected. This gives the researchers who proposed the...
Barney Graham, a former scientist at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was thrilled yesterday when Pfizer announced encouraging results from an experimental vaccine that could protect against a major childhood killer. In a press release, the company said immunizing pregnant women * with its vaccine against respiratory...
When paleontologist Dean Lomax was plumbing the depths of a fossil collection at Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History in 2016, one dusty specimen caught his eye. It resembled a crocodile compressed onto a slab of slate. Flaking paint and specks of white plaster revealed the “skeleton” was actually a carefully constructed plaster cast—and that it was of no...