AUSTIN, TEXAS— For canaries, learning to eat seeds can be a tough nut to crack. Researchers reported last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology that some of these birds are up to four times faster than their peers at cracking open hard shells and accessing the tasty morsels within. The team filmed 90...
The new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is preparing to shine a bright light on science—and scientists. This week, it created two investigative panels that will scrutinize the country’s relationship with China and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both committees are expected to grill many prominent scientists and federal research officials on their...
A decade after Kyoto University biologist Shinya Yamanaka won a share of a Nobel Prize for discovering a cocktail of proteins that reprogram adult cells into versatile stem cells, two teams argue the proteins can turn back the clock for entire organisms—perhaps one day humans. One group at a biotech used gene therapy to deliver some of the so-called Yamanaka factors into old mice, and...
One of the most intractable questions in astronomy—aside from what makes up dark matter and whether life exists elsewhere in the universe—is whether the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will ever be built on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The project, led by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology with partners abroad, aims to construct by far the largest telescope...