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21,064 articles from ScienceNOW

Have scientists finally made sense of Hawking’s famous formula for disorder in a black hole?

Fifty years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in material. The arguments for black hole entropy were indirect, however, and no one had derived the famous equation from the fundamental definition of entropy—at least not for realistic...


WEDNESDAY 27. MARCH 2024


Black hole at center of Milky Way may be blasting out a jet

The supermassive black holes at the centers of many galaxies generate powerful jets, blasting particles thousands of light-years into space. This new image of the Milky Way’s black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), suggests it may have one, too, but perhaps of a more modest nature. The image—taken with polarized light—was released today by the Event Horizon...

Bird flu discovered in U.S. dairy cows is ‘disturbing’

The bird flu virus that has wreaked havoc around the world appears to have surfaced in U.S. dairy cows, the first time this viral subtype has been documented in any cattle. Three U.S. states—Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico—on 25 March reported cows sickened with what scientists are presuming is the same H5N1 strain of influenza that has killed hundreds of millions of poultry and wild...


TUESDAY 26. MARCH 2024


Genetically engineered marmosets promise insight into early stages of Parkinson’s

By the time a person shows symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, neurons in a part of their brain key to movement have already quietly died. To learn how this process unfolds, identify warning signs, and test treatments, researchers have long wanted an animal model of the disease’s early stages. Now, they may have one: a cohort of transgenic marmosets, described at a conference on...

Smallpox may be gone but U.S. should better prepare for its return, report says

Nearly 5 decades after the last documented case, smallpox remains the only human disease that has been officially eradicated. But a new report concludes that the United States can do much to strengthen its ability to respond if the dreaded disease resurfaces, whether naturally, through a lab “leak” of the responsible virus, or from an act of terrorism. The...


MONDAY 25. MARCH 2024


Long-lasting, injectable HIV prevention drug set for “aggressive” roll-out in Africa

Tools to fight HIV tend to come late to sub-Saharan Africa, the region hardest hit by the epidemic. After powerful, lifesaving cocktails of HIV drugs came to market in 1996, it took 7 years before they began to reach large numbers of people living with the virus there. When pills to prevent, rather than treat, HIV infection were introduced in 2012—a strategy known as pre-exposure...

South Korea to join the European Union’s research funding program

The European Commission announced today that South Korea will join Horizon Europe, as the 7-year, €95.5 billion ($104 billion) research funding program continues to expand far beyond the continent. South Korea will be the first East Asian country to “associate to” Horizon Europe, paying into the program so that the nation’s researchers can apply for and lead Horizon...

Fewer U.S. scientists are pursuing postdoc positions, new data show

Gorodenkoff/Getty Images New data released by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) reveal a sharp drop in the number of U.S. citizens working as postdocs, especially in the biological and biomedical sciences. The trend underscores concerns that the academic community is facing a postdoc shortage and that early-career scientists are...