One of the most widespread parasites on the planet can also be one of the most difficult to study. Toxoplasma gondii —a single-celled protozoan—is capable of infecting almost every mammal and bird species, including humans , and in severe cases causes blindness, birth defects, and death. Yet it only sexually...

When the immense Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020, it left gaping holes in astronomy . Now, a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) hopes to address some of the gaps with a very different instrument: a tightly packed array of relatively inexpensive radio dishes that aims to quickly image radio sources across wide swaths of the...

Jurassic Park may be about to get a makeover. A new study finds that Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives did not look like crocodiles, with teeth jutting from their maws in all their full, razor-sharp glory. Instead, these dinosaurs covered their chompers with lips, more like today’s lizards. “This is a nice, concise answer to a question that has...

PARTICLE PHYSICS Particle mass dispels hint of new physics A fleeting, weighty elementary particle called the W boson has just the mass predicted by theory, physicists working with Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported this week at a conference in Italy. The finding comes from ATLAS, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC,...

Around 500 C.E., a new government arose in the community now called Río Viejo, near the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It was once the largest city in the region, but it had shrunk by half and lost its political authority. The new rulers aimed to step into that power vacuum. But they had one problem: the ruins of a complex of ceremonial buildings built by Río Viejo’s last...

Sweeping new study based on archaeological evidence, chemical isotope analysis, and ancient DNA

In the face of intense pressure and criticism from many in the scientific community, Chinese researchers today released a trove of new genetic data that may offer fresh clues to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. They also substantially revised a related study they first posted online 13 months ago to include this evidence, which some scientists say gives more credibility to the thesis...

Rover by rover, NASA’s exploration of Mars is building to an expensive climax: a multibillion-dollar mission later this decade to collect the rock samples currently being gathered by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth. But then what? NASA offered a partial answer to that question today. It envisions a series of lower cost Mars missions, costing up to...

Scientists have uncovered the brain circuits that may underlie binge eating disorder and related conditions. The neural wiring is the same as that tied to psychiatric conditions such as drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The work could lead to new ways to understand and treat eating disorders, says Rebecca Boswell, a clinical psychologist at Princeton University...

For years, scientists and conservationists have urged China’s government to crack down on a thriving trade in wild animals that they say both threatens the nation’s rich biodiversity and increases the risk that a dangerous disease will jump from wildlife to humans. Now, some of those pleas are being answered: On 1 May, officials will begin to enforce a strengthened Wildlife...

The Swahili coast, stretching more than 3000 kilometers from southern Ethiopia to Tanzania, was a hub of medieval trade, exporting ivory and other resources from the African interior to South Asia, the Arab world, and Persia. Its cultural legacy remains potent: Swahili is now spoken across large parts of Africa, and the ruins of ancient towns, many with mosques and other buildings cut...

Scientists suggest GISAID, a virus sequence database, is rewriting pandemic history

Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although...

A class of Alzheimer’s drugs that aims to slow cognitive decline, including the antibody lecanemab that was granted accelerated approval in the United States in January , can cause brain shrinkage, researchers report in a new analysis. Although scientists and drug developers have documented this loss of brain volume in clinical trial participants for years, the scientific...

Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen, had modest expectations 9 months ago, when she and her collaborators began to use JWST, the giant new space telescope, to look back in time for the universe’s first galaxies . Modeling suggested the patch of sky they were examining would hold just 0.2 galaxies—none, in other words, unless they got...

Arati Prabhakar has been part of the U.S. research establishment for 3 decades. Now, the 64-year-old applied physicist stands at its epicenter, as science adviser to President Joe Biden and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Last week, in her first extended media interview since being confirmed by the Senate on 3 October 2022, she laid out her vision for...

Male cockroaches try to woo females with sugary treats. But a preponderance of poisoned bait traps has thrown an evolutionary wrench into this classic courting strategy, making some cockroaches lose their sweet tooth. Now, scientists behind a study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B report that some crafty male roaches appear to have cooked up a new...

Some 500 years ago, a city-living, human-biting form of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti began to hitch rides out of West African ports during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It spread to the Americas and then to Asia, causing centuries of disease outbreaks to ripple through the colonial world. Today, its globally invasive descendants act as the main disease vector...

Even a fisher’s yarn would sell a whale shark short. These fish—the biggest on the planet—stretch up to 18 meters long and weigh as much as two elephants. The superlatives don’t end there: Whale sharks also have one of the longest vertical ranges of any sea creature, filter feeding from the surface of the ocean to nearly 2000 meters down into the inky abyss. Swimming...

ROBERT NEUBECKER Each year, thousands of newly minted U.S. Ph.D. recipients complete the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), providing information about their race, gender, disability status, educational background, postgraduate plans, and more. The long-running census is critical for understanding which groups are underrepresented in the U.S. science,...

When the first x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) opened in 2009 at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, it provided a new way to look at the atomic-scale world, revealing details about biochemical processes such as photosynthesis and exotic materials such as superconductors. But since then, only four other such billion-dollar facilities have been built worldwide, and getting...

PUBLIC HEALTH Next-gen bed nets get go-ahead A new type of malaria-fighting bed net received a major endorsement from the World Health Organization (WHO) last week. The net combines two chemicals to more effectively kill the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite behind malaria, a disease that killed an estimated 619,000 people...

More than 100 U.S. biomedical scientists whose collaborations with China were once encouraged have lost their jobs

Melissa Miller knew something was off when she began to examine a sea otter that had died in San Simeon, a coastal California town about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the winter of 2020. Nearly all of the animal’s body fat was inflamed. “It felt like there were little bumps all through it,” she says—a condition the veterinary pathologist had never seen in her...