As big as they are, whales are still needles in the proverbial haystack of the ocean—hard to spot, and even harder to track. But now, an international consortium of researchers has charted the movements of one species—southern right whales—over the past few decades by comparing chemical analyses of their skin samples with maps of the ocean’s chemistry. The work reveals new...

Astronomers’ efforts to get the United Nations to back guidelines to stop satellites from spoiling telescopes’ views have become bogged down in diplomatic bureaucracy. At a U.N. subcommittee meeting earlier this month in Vienna, delegates did not unanimously back the formation of an expert group to draft guidelines that could establish norms to help protect the night sky. Astronomers...

A storm is brewing over the U.S. polar research program’s medical qualifications process, which screens hundreds of scientists for physical and psychological ailments each year before they deploy to field sites in Antarctica and Greenland where they will have limited access to medical care. Scientists are too often rejected for questionable reasons, some researchers argue. “We have...

In December 2022, two scientists took to a stage and interrupted the start of a talk at an American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference, unfurling a banner urging their colleagues to embrace climate activism. The protest lasted just 32 seconds. As applause and cheers broke out in the audience, event officials pulled the banner from their hands. AGU expelled the scientists from the...

Off the icy shores of Antarctica each spring, an explosion of life unfolds that is so large it’s visible from space. As iron-rich waters rise from below, the surface of the Southern Ocean swirls with psychedelic clouds of bright green phytoplankton—single-celled plants that suck up carbon from the atmosphere and form the base of the food chain by sustaining krill, which is in turn...

In Focus Some types of sharks, such as catsharks and shysharks, hatch from egg cases, known as a “mermaid’s purse.” Each leathery pouch contains an embryo; a yolk supply supports these ovipara as they develop. This photo of egg cases from the small-spotted catshark (...

Touch screens owe their magic to an electrically conductive film that sits just below the surface. In most devices, this layer is made from a compound known as indium tin oxide (ITO), which is rigid, expensive to manufacture, and requires the rare metal indium. Now, researchers have created a cheap and flexible alternative to ITO that could not only lower costs for touch screens, solar...

Over thousands of years, Indigenous communities have cultivated relationships with and accumulated knowledge on psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, the Amazonian botanical brew ayahuasca, and the West African shrub iboga. More recently, psychedelics have exploded onto the stage of Western science. Clinical trials of these substances in the past 15 years have produced...

But will doctors embrace the grainier, lower-resolution images of the body’s insides?

It’s all we’ve been talking about since November,” says Patrick Franzen, publishing director for SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He’s referring to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot unveiled that month. In response to a prompt, ChatGPT can spin out fluent and seemingly well-informed reports, essays—and scientific manuscripts....

A scheme to reduce the errors that plague quantum computers is a step closer to reality, researchers at Google announced today. Instead of ordinary bits that can be set to 0 or 1, a quantum computer uses qubits that can be set to 0 and 1 at the same time. But they are fragile. One tactic for protecting the information carried by one qubit is to spread it out over many others. Now, the...

In June 2022, a young man in his 30s severely sick with mpox, the viral disease formerly known as monkeypox, was admitted to the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition hospital in Mexico City. Tests showed the patient was also HIV-positive, which he had not known, and that his blood had few CD4 cells, critical immune cells that HIV attacks. The man’s...

Compared with other mammals, bats are notorious for hosting more viruses that are dangerous to people but not themselves. It’s an oddity that’s drawn renewed attention since COVID-19 broke out in humans—many scientists suspect the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 leaped from bats into people, directly or via an intermediate host. Seeking to create large quantities of bat tissue to help study...

Research groups in Japan are lining up against a government plan to exert greater control over the Science Council of Japan (SCJ), the country’s national scientific academy. They argue the changes would expose the council to political influence and weaken its independence. More than five dozen academic societies, as well as SCJ itself, have raised concerns that the ruling...

Earlier this week, a study made headlines claiming that the mysterious “dark energy” cosmologists believe is accelerating the expansion of the universe could arise from supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies. If true, the connection would link two of the most mind-bending concepts in physics--black holes and dark energy--and suggest that the source of the latter has been...

Canada’s three major national research agencies will no longer fund proposals from scientists doing “sensitive research” that involves foreign collaborators deemed to pose a security risk to the country. Although the new policy, announced on 14 February, doesn’t mention China, it parallels actions taken in recent years by the United States, Australia, and other countries to...

In a cave in Tarragona, Spain, about 5000 years ago, someone snuck up behind an older man and hit him over the head with a blunt object, likely killing him. The archaeological record is full of such attacks, yet researchers have struggled to figure out the details of what occurred. Now, they’re a lot closer, thanks to a new study in which scientists smashed a bunch of fake skulls in the...

As oil and gas development pushes into deeper waters off the U.S. coast, federal officials want to tighten rules for when energy firms must look for archaeological sites before drilling. A proposal released this week would require that oil and gas companies survey any area where they plan to disturb the sea floor, not just places where data or models suggest there is a shipwreck or other...

ASTRONOMY Chile radio telescope array gains keener vision ALMA, one of the world’s biggest radio telescope arrays, is getting hardware and software upgrades to allow it to collect much more data and produce sharper images. Announced last week, the latest modernizations to ALMA—officially the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array,...

Overlooked by the oil industry, natural hydrogen could power society for thousands of years

Last year, when the National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired its 192 laser beams at a gold cylinder enclosing a tiny sphere of hydrogen isotopes, it did more than spark a historic fusion reaction. The shot— the first to produce more energy than the lasers delivered —also triggered a burst of optimism among some fusion scientists that the same general approach could one...

After a forest fire, land managers can speed up vegetation’s recovery by reseeding the crisped land, often from planes or helicopters. But success is uncertain. Birds eat the seeds, or they might not germinate if the soil is too hard. Now, researchers have designed a lightweight wooden carrier that corkscrews the seeds securely into the ground, improving the odds for the landscape’s...

Any work on solar geoengineering—the notion of artificially making the atmosphere more reflective to cool an overheated planet—is fraught with controversy. Last year, for example, a tech entrepreneur claimed he launched two weather balloons from Baja California into the stratosphere, where they may have released a puff of sulfur dioxide that gave rise to a...

Leaders in the U.S. scientific community must dismantle the power structures that lead to racial inequities within their organizations and create an environment in which everyone feels supported, says a report released today by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine . The 359-page report includes 12 recommendations for leaders who want to foster...