feed info

21,032 articles from ScienceNOW

A valid U.S. visa didn’t stop these Chinese graduate students from being deported

More than a dozen Chinese graduate students holding valid U.S. visas are the latest pawns amid the rising political tensions between the two countries. In the past 3 months, students in Ph.D. science programs at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and other major U.S. research universities have been denied re-entry after visiting family in China—and immediately sent back...


THURSDAY 29. FEBRUARY 2024


Is the snake that just bit you deadly? Venom ‘pregnancy test’ could tell

Cecilie Knudsen placed the urine on one end of the strip, then sat anxiously for 15 minutes to see whether one or two lines appeared. She wasn’t testing for pregnancy. Instead, Knudsen, a biotechnologist and co-founder of VenomAid Diagnostics, was waiting to see whether the test she and her colleagues developed would accurately detect the presence of a particular snake venom in a sample...

Surprise RNAs solve mystery of how butterfly wings get their colorful patterns

A mutant butterfly for sale on eBay has helped upend naturalists’ picture of how butterfly wings acquire their intricate variety of red, yellow, white, and black stripes. It and recent research into other butterflies shows how visible traits in many animals may be controlled by the same underexplored genetic regulatory mechanism, based not on proteins, but on RNA. In 2016,...


WEDNESDAY 28. FEBRUARY 2024


French scientists alarmed by ‘disastrous’ cut to research budget

Scientists in France are reeling after the government announced it will cut €904 million from this year’s budget for research and higher education. The cut, announced last week, is part of a broader €10 billion savings package that the government says is necessary to limit the nation’s public deficit in the face of dwindling economic growth since the budget law was...

NSF board approves funding for just one of two proposed giant telescopes

U.S. astronomers will have to make do with one giant ground-based telescope rather than the desired two, the National Science Board (NSB) announced yesterday. Meeting last week, the panel of scientists that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF) capped the budget of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP) at $1.6 billion, enough for a substantial share in one...

Fallout from Israel-Hamas war causing ‘significant harm’ to researchers in Israel, survey finds

Academic researchers in Israel say they are being “affected dramatically” by negative international reactions to Israel’s military actions against Hamas in Gaza, a recent survey finds. And many fear the professional fallout from the war will become much worse in the future. Since the war began with Hamas’s 7 October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, it has claimed the...

International panel calls for tighter oversight of risky pathogen studies

Research on dangerous human pathogens is essential to protect people from epidemics and pandemics, but safety rules for such work need to be tighter and more consistent around the world, according to a report released today by a broad international task force launched in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “All countries must look carefully at pathogen security, and we...

Why are all proteins ‘left-handed’? New theory could solve origin of life mystery

There’s a bias at the heart of life, and its origin is an enduring mystery. Nearly all the amino acid building blocks of proteins today exist in mirror-image forms, like right- and left-handed gloves. But life only uses left-handed ones, even though both forms should have been equally abundant during the planet’s early days and can readily link up in the lab. Something must have...


TUESDAY 27. FEBRUARY 2024


The world’s stockpile of cholera vaccine is empty—but relief is on the way

The world has run out of cholera vaccines—just when the deadly disease is on a rampage not seen in many years. Fifteen countries are currently reporting active outbreaks, with more than 40,900 cases and 775 deaths reported in January alone. But all available doses of oral cholera vaccines in the global stockpile have been allocated until mid-March, Philippe Barboza, cholera team lead at...

Smithsonian task force pushes for speedy repatriation of 30,000 human remains

Since the 19th century, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have obtained, studied, and stored more than 30,000 human remains, one of the largest such collections in the United States. In the past, many remains were studied in order to justify scientific racism. Now, the institution should rapidly offer to return most of these remains to lineal descendants or descendant communities,...


MONDAY 26. FEBRUARY 2024


Watch a marlin flash bright stripes before a deadly strike

With their spearlike noses, high-speeds, and group attacks, striped marlin ( Kajikia audax ) are fearsome predators of sardines and other small fish. But how do they avoid impaling one another during these mêlées? New drone footage may provide the answer. As seen above, right before a marlin attacks a school of sardines, it changes color, dialing up the...


SATURDAY 24. FEBRUARY 2024


Huge genome study confronted by concerns over race analysis

An uproar broke out on social media this week after Nature published a paper about a massive U.S. health research effort to capture the genetic diversity of people across the country. Critics said a key figure, which depicts patterns of relatedness among nearly 250,000 study volunteers whose genomes were sequenced, could mislead some readers into thinking the data support...


FRIDAY 23. FEBRUARY 2024


Alabama IVF ruling may halt uterine transplant program

The Supreme Court of Alabama’s ruling last week declaring frozen embryos at fertility clinics to be people has upended patient care there. The state’s two leading private in vitro fertilization providers as well as the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) paused all IVF procedures earlier this week while officials sort through the legal risks of continuing to create and store...

On war’s second anniversary, Ukraine’s scientific community mourns lost colleagues

Just before daybreak on 2 January, air raid sirens blared in Kyiv—a near-daily occurrence that often passes without incident. Not that day. Explosions resounded across the Ukrainian capital as air defenses attempted to shoot down a rain of incoming missiles, including 10 hypersonic Kinzhals. The detonations woke Natalia Shevtsova, a radioecologist at the National Academy of Sciences of...

Poised to be first widely consumed gene-edited animals, virus-resistant pigs trot toward market

Pigs, cattle, and other livestock with edited genes are still far from most dinner plates, but a U.K. company has taken a big step toward the supermarket by engineering several commercial breeds of pigs to be resistant to a virus that devastates the swine industry. The firm, Genus plc, hopes that by year’s end the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will formally approve the pigs...

Texas company lands first private spacecraft on the Moon

Nearly 50 years ago, NASA shut off a set of seismometers and heat probes on the Moon’s surface—the last scientific instruments Apollo astronauts had placed. Now, a private lander built and operated by a Texas company has successfully carried the first NASA-funded scientific instruments to the lunar soil since then. Yesterday, at 6:23 p.m. EST,...

Tinkering with fungus genes can turn blue cheeses red, green, or white

Naturally blue food is hard to find—except on a cheese platter. Roquefort, Gorgonzola, and blue Stilton are prized for their distinctive tastes and characteristic blue veins. Now, researchers have figured out how the fungi that give these cheeses their flavors also produce that color . And by disrupting the genes that create the hue, they can make blue cheeses that taste...