Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal eLife and a longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas. “I have been informed that I am being replaced as the...

Worried that bioterrorists will take advantage of the growing ease of creating risky pathogens in the lab, federal officials are beefing up guidelines for companies that sell nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA. The recommendations, released earlier this month, update the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS’s) 13-year-old guidance for screening orders to cover more forms...

Worried that bioterrorists will take advantage of the growing ease of creating risky pathogens in the lab, federal officials are beefing up guidelines for companies that sell nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA. The recommendations, released earlier this month, update the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS’s) 13-year-old guidance for screening orders to cover more forms...

Keep working on it. That’s the reaction of U.S. science watchdog groups to the first attempts by federal health agencies to flesh out a promise by President Joe Biden to restore trust in government by ensuring that government scientists are free to do their jobs without political meddling. One week after taking office in January 2021, Biden ordered a review of...

Keep working on it. That’s the reaction of U.S. science watchdog groups to the first attempts by federal health agencies to flesh out a promise by President Joe Biden to restore trust in government by ensuring that government scientists are free to do their jobs without political meddling. One week after taking office in January 2021, Biden ordered a review of...

Few places are as inhospitable as the top of Llullaillaco, a 6700-meter volcano on the border between Chile and Argentina. Winds howl nonstop and no plants live there; daytime temperatures never get above freezing and plummet even more come nightfall. Oxygen levels are just 40% of those at sea level, too low for mammals to live there —or so biologists thought until 3 years ago when a...

Few places are as inhospitable as the top of Llullaillaco, a 6700-meter volcano on the border between Chile and Argentina. Winds howl nonstop and no plants live there; daytime temperatures never get above freezing and plummet even more come nightfall. Oxygen levels are just 40% of those at sea level, too low for mammals to live there —or so biologists thought until 3 years ago when a...

A push to rejuvenate the U.S. semiconductor industry won’t succeed without including more women and minorities in the workforce. That’s the rationale for a new academic consortium aimed at increasing diversity in microelectronics being launched by the women presidents and engineering deans at six prominent universities. “This is personal for us,” say the founders of the...

Every 17 years, billions of cicadas emerge from the soil in the eastern United States to climb trees, mate, and lay eggs. For a few weeks, the plump insects provide an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds, mammals, and other predators. “It’s a phenomenal explosion to an ecosystem,” says Kathy Williams, an insect ecologist at San Diego State University. The consequences...

Shock waves from the war between Israel and Hamas are rocking the scientific community in the region and around the world. In Israel, universities are mourning scientists and others killed in the 7 October surprise attack by Hamas militants. Hamas, widely considered a terrorist organization, rules the Gaza Strip. Academic laboratories are emptying as foreign graduate students...

Six months after announcing the $5 billion Project NextGen to develop treatments and vaccines that can “stay ahead of COVID-19,” the U.S. government has awarded 20 contracts that reveal what much of that sum will support. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on 13 October that up to $1.2 billion will go to three vaccine developers aiming to...

Scientists are primed to plant thousands of trees and shrubs after dams come down along the Klamath River

Scientists are primed to plant thousands of trees and shrubs after dams come down along the Klamath River

The latest in science and policy

Adult horsehair worms look about how you’d expect given their name: They’re long, noodlelike creatures that resemble wiggling horse hairs. They live and reproduce in water, but their young only develop inside the bodies of other animals—usually terrestrial insects such as praying mantises. Once they’ve finished growing inside their unwitting vessel, the worms must convince their...

Adult horsehair worms look about how you’d expect given their name: They’re long, noodlelike creatures that resemble wiggling horse hairs. They live and reproduce in water, but their young only develop inside the bodies of other animals—usually terrestrial insects such as praying mantises. Once they’ve finished growing inside their unwitting vessel, the worms must convince their...

A Senate hearing today to consider the nomination of Monica Bertagnolli to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) went well for the cancer surgeon. Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I–VT) grilled Bertagnolli about NIH’s role in controlling drug prices, and Republican members pressed her on politically sensitive research. But the overall tone was friendly and suggested no major...

A web of steel girders is rising from the flattened summit of Cerro Armazones, 3000 meters above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The dome it will support will be vast—with a footprint as big as a soccer field and almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty— and unexpectedly nimble: It will smoothly rotate on rails as a giant telescope inside tracks stars through the night....

As editor-elect of the journal Southeastern Archaeology , Rob Beck helped choose a cover photo for the penultimate issue of 2020. It showed about 20 ceramic vessels, some painted with colorful patterns. They had been excavated in the early 1900s from the Crystal River Archaeological State Park in Florida, home to some of the region’s oldest ancient Indigenous earthworks....

An industry-academic initiative announced today aims to create the largest ever database of genomes exclusively from people with African ancestry. Four biopharma companies contributing $80 million have teamed up with Meharry Medical College to launch the effort, which hopes to recruit up to 500,000 African Americans and people from Africa and combine their DNA and medical data into a...

From bacteria to blue whales, the number of cells in living things exceeds the estimated number of sand grains on Earth by a factor of a trillion. It’s 1 million times larger than all the stars in the universe. And the number of cells that have ever lived is 10 orders of magnitude larger still, according to new estimates researchers reported last week in Current...

A pledge by the United Kingdom’s Conservative government to “kick woke ideology out of science” has stirred controversy among many scientists. In recent remarks, the top U.K. science official said the government aims to stop “the steady creep of political correctness” in research and will review the use of questions related to sex and gender in scientific studies. Many...

If a snakebitten patient stumbled into an Egyptian physician’s office some 2500 years ago, the doctor might have reached for a papyrus scroll describing 34 snakes and their bites in hieratic script used by ancient Egyptians, with advice on how to treat them. This ancient manual is considered one of the world’s first medical texts. Since the scroll was first translated 60...

If a snakebitten patient stumbled into an Egyptian physician’s office some 2500 years ago, the doctor might have reached for a papyrus scroll describing 34 snakes and their bites in hieratic script used by ancient Egyptians, with advice on how to treat them. This ancient manual is considered one of the world’s first medical texts. Since the scroll was first translated 60...