When a new island or lake appears, the plants and animals that get there first have a leg up on later arrivals and are more likely to diversify into new species—or so evolutionary biologists have long assumed. But a study of fossils from East Africa’s Lake Victoria shows that it takes more than arriving early to win the speciation race. Although several kinds of fish colonized this...

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to scientists who developed quantum dots, tiny nanometer-sized crystals that have tunable optical and electronic properties. Moungi Bawendi of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Louis Brus of Columbia University , and Alexei Ekimov of...

In an unusual reversal, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has decided North America’s monarch butterfly is not “endangered.” Instead, the insect is only “vulnerable” to extinction, the group said last week—adding that it could lower the alarm still further, changing the listing to “near threatened” if an upcoming census suggests the population is...

One of the most delightful sounds to a cat lover is their feline friend’s rumbling noise when they get a little scritch behind the ears. Yet how cats produce their contented purrs has long been a mystery. A new study may finally have the answer. Domestic cats possess “pads” embedded within their vocal cords, which add an extra layer of fatty tissue that allows them to...

There just doesn’t seem to be enough of the Solar System. Beyond Neptune’s orbit lie thousands of small icy objects in the Kuiper belt, with Pluto its most famous resident. But after 50 astronomical units (AU)—50 times the distance between Earth and the Sun—the belt ends suddenly and the number of objects drops to zero. Meanwhile, in other solar systems, similar belts stretch...

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been won by three researchers who developed ways to produce flashes of light so fast that they can capture the movements of electrons in and around atoms and molecules. Pierre Agostini of Ohio State University, Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University share the award for...

U.S. scientists bracing for a government shutdown that would have furloughed federal researchers and disrupted grantmaking are relieved that Congress averted a closure over the weekend with a temporary spending agreement. But Congress is still a long way from approving 2024 spending bills for research agencies. And scientists are likely to be disappointed with many of the...

Lightning has struck a second time for physicists using lasers to achieve nuclear fusion—the process in which two atomic nuclei combine into one while releasing enormous amounts of energy. On 30 July, the 192 lasers of the stadium-size National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory instantaneously crushed a tiny capsule filled with deuterium and tritium,...

The World Health Organization (WHO) today recommended widespread use of a second vaccine against malaria, a disease that kills more than half a million children each year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The new vaccine, called R21/Matrix-M, follows in the footsteps of the first malaria vaccine, called Mosquirix or RTS,S, for which WHO made a similar recommendation 2...

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to scientists whose work provided a key breakthrough needed to develop a novel type of vaccine, which led to some of the first shots that protected against COVID-19. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the prize “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development...

The world may soon have another powerful weapon against malaria, a disease that kills half a million people each year, most of them young children. Data from a trial involving 4800 children in four African countries suggest a vaccine developed at the University of Oxford, known as R21/MatrixM, provides significant protection against the disease. The results were posted as a...

With a U.S. government shutdown looming on 1 October, federal research agencies are preparing to wind down most operations. As in past shutdowns , staff will be sent home, websites frozen, meetings postponed, training disrupted, and research projects halted . Depending on how long the pause lasts, instruments could be closed and missions delayed...

With their broad, flattened snout tipped at each end with giant google eyes, hammerhead sharks are both charismatic and easy to spot. Now, for the first time, scientists have captured step-by-step how this “hammer” forms in developing embryos. Unlike most fish, hammerheads give birth to live young. Yet researchers have not been able learn much about the development of any of...

Hydrogen seems like the perfect fuel. By weight it packs more punch than any other fuel. It can be made from water, meaning supply is almost limitless, in principle. And when burned or run through a fuel cell, it generates energy without any carbon pollution. But hydrogen takes up enormous volume, making it impractical to store. Compressing it helps, but is expensive and...

India tests heat alerts, tree planting, and modified roofs

Researchers are probing how high temperatures lead to premature birth and other harmful outcomes

BIOGEOGRAPHY Fairy circles abound in dry regions of many countries Mysterious patches of vegetation called fairy circles are well documented in the drylands of Australia and Namibia. Now, a study that combines machine learning and satellite images that span the continents reports examples in 13 other countries, mainly in Africa...

Related articles Embattled physicist files patent for unprecedented ambient superconductor BY Robert F. Service Plagiarism allegations pursue physicist behind stunning...

Scientists are on alert for altered routes and new bird-borne pathogens

In oral histories, the Salish people of the U.S. Pacific Northwest tell of a formative event in which a great serpent spirit, a’yahos , shook the earth , carving out cliffs and forming new lakes. The story mirrors geologic evidence that roughly between 900 C.E. and 930 C.E. , whole forests were swept into lakebeds and new lakes appeared...

Related articles Heat and disease will exact a heavy toll as climate warms BY Tim Appenzeller Changing bird migrations threaten to bring new...

Call it a “mom club” for kangaroos. When their young are in tow, the marsupials appear to form tight-knit social groups with other mothers—and some moms are clearly more popular, according to a new study. These social gatherings might work like neighborhood watch programs, researchers say, keeping young joeys safe from foxes and dingoes, and fending off rambunctious males....

Gravity pulls antimatter down just like ordinary matter, a new experiment shows. The finding won’t shock many physicists. But it does put a damper on some offbeat theories that, in order to solve some of cosmology’s biggest mysteries, posit that gravity pushes rather than pulls on antimatter—so that the stuff is subject to “antigravity.” “I’m not surprised,” says...

About 465 million years ago, an armored critter resembling a sea roach died near what is now Prague. The final meal of this animal—a trilobite—still sat in its guts as sediment buried its body in the sea floor of an ancient Paleozoic sea. There, it remained entombed for ages. Now, scientific sleuths have deduced the contents of this meal, providing the first direct evidence of the...

Evolutionary biologists have long debated why snakes lost their limbs. Did it help them burrow? Or reduce drag when swimming? There’s not enough fossil evidence to conclusively answer the question. So researchers decided to glean intel from current species—specifically, their brains. Researchers scanned 58 modern snake and lizard species to create 3D models of their brains...

Related article Malaria cases could ebb in an even hotter world. But other diseases will get worse BY Kai Kupferschmidt This special issue of...

Disease forecasters struggle with the complex impacts of climate change

An elephant can lift logs with its trunk and also pick up a potato chip without breaking it. This combination of brute force and soft touch comes from the trunk’s musculature, the most complex known in the animal world. Now, in the most detailed examination ever of this unusual appendage, researchers have mapped and counted the muscle bundles in a baby elephant’s trunk with a special...

Farmers and gardeners are often pleased to see earthworms slithering through their soil. But how much do they actually help plants grow? According to the first worldwide estimate of the invertebrates’ contribution to crop yields, earthworms add more than 140 million tons of food each year . For wheat harvests alone, that’s roughly equivalent to one slice in every loaf...

In a development that has alarmed conservation biologists, the avian flu strain that has devastated birds and marine mammals on five continents has reached Ecuador’s Galápagos National Park, home to species that are found nowhere else. “It is extremely concerning from a conservation perspective,” says Marcela Uhart, a wildlife veterinarian at the University of California...

Last Wednesday afternoon, Anthony Fauci, one of the world’s most famous scientists, answered the door of his Washington, D.C., house in jeans and a T-shirt, apologizing for the boxes in his living room. Although he retired in December 2022 from directing the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), he has just recently finished deciding what should go to archives...

Just how long does a cluster of protons and neutrons have to stick together to count as an atomic nucleus? That’s the question raised by the observation of nitrogen-9, a fleeting nucleus that possesses seven protons and two neutrons, a ratio so lopsided that it fates the tiny knot of matter to fall apart almost instantly, in less than one-billionth of a nanosecond. Yet it still...

Earth has a supercontinent in its future. In about 250 million years, all of today’s major land masses will pile together into one, just as they did about 300 million years ago to form Pangaea. And when they do, new simulations suggest, it could tip our planet’s climate into an extremely hot state almost entirely uninhabitable for mammals. Earth’s surface is a jigsaw of...

Most of the small asteroids that enter Earth’s atmosphere end their plunge in screaming, fiery violence. But today, after detaching from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a capsule carrying asteroid samples descended gently by parachute before touching down in the Utah desert. The cupful of pebbles and grit it delivered—the culmination of 7 years of effort and $1 billion of expense—...

Since early in the pandemic, researchers and physicians have known all too well that COVID-19 can affect various organs, such as the brain, lungs, heart, and kidneys. But how long does the damage linger, and what does it mean for a patient’s recovery? Imaging studies investigating long-term effects of COVID-19 have often focused on one organ at a time, limiting...

When Ryo Minemizu, a professional underwater photographer, posted photos of an elegant ladybug-size flittering creature off Okinawa, Japan, in 2018, biologists were baffled . It wasn’t a worm, a mollusk, or a crustacean. What was it? No one knew. One of those intrigued was Igor Adameyko, a developmental neurobiologist at the Medical University of...

NASA’s audacious Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has serious technical flaws and “unrealistic” assumptions about its budget and timetable, an independent review found in a report released yesterday . Originally estimated to cost some $4 billion, the reviewers found that NASA’s share of the mission could end up costing between $8 billion to $11 billion,...

When it comes to learned behavior, even the simplest minds are capable of advanced thought. The Caribbean box jellyfish ( Tripedalia cystophora ), which doesn’t even have a brain, can alter its behavior based on past experiences, new research reveals. Scientists believe the creature uses this learning ability along with its astoundingly complex visual system to navigate...

Think “cowboy,” and you might picture John Wayne riding herd across the U.S. West. But the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black . That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico. The work, published in Scientific Reports...