Stressful day at the office? Muscles need soothing? A trip to a newly described exoplanet—featuring a thick saunalike steam atmosphere—may be in order. Of course, it would be a long trip for a spa day, given the planet’s location 72 light-years from Earth. Amadeo Castro-González, an astronomer at the Spanish Astrobiology Center who led a recent study describing the steamy...

It’s official: President Joe Biden wants cancer researcher Monica Bertagnolli to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Nearly a month after the media widely reported she was the White House’s choice to succeed Francis Collins as chief of the world’s largest biomedical research agency, Biden today announced Bertagnolli’s...

A groundbreaking epidemiological study has produced the most compelling evidence yet that exposure to the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. The movement disorder afflicts about 1 million Americans, and is likely the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease in the world; its global prevalence...

In 1978, at the tender age of 4, a mountain gorilla named Titus living in East Africa’s Virunga Mountains experienced a series of unthinkable tragedies. His father and brother were killed by poachers, and as his tribe reshuffled and males fought for dominance, another gorilla killed his younger sister. His mother and older sister fled the dangerous situation, leaving him to fend for...

Everywhere they go, humans leave stray DNA. Police have used genetic sequences retrieved from cigarette butts and coffee cups to identify suspects; archaeologists have sifted DNA from cave dirt to identify ancient humans. But for scientists aiming to capture genetic information not about people, but about animals, plants, and microbes, the ubiquity of human DNA and the ability of even...