History remembers October 4, 1957, a lot better than it remembers January 4, 1958—though in recent weeks, the second date is coming to loom larger than the first. October 4, 1957, was the day the Soviet Union Launched Sputnik—the world’s first satellite—an achievement that heralded the start of the space age. “RUSS SATELLITE CIRCLING EARTH,” shouted the Los...

When Nathan Brosnan went missing his family was plunged into the agony of ‘not knowing’. A national DNA program is trying to give families like theirs answersGet our free news app, morning email briefing and daily news podcastIn a life punctuated by cycles of chaos, there was always one thing 35-year-old Nathan Brosnan kept constant. “It didn’t matter if he was having a mental health...

A clinical trial is only as powerful as its participants. For years, researchers have struggled to fill clinical trials and enroll sufficiently diverse groups of patients for results to reflect the broader population, in part because of stringent guidelines on who can participate.

A systematic review of 301 academic articles on 'cultural ecosystem services' has enabled researchers to identify how these nonmaterial contributions from nature are linked to and significantly affect human well-being. They identified 227 unique pathways through which human interaction with nature positively or negatively affects well-being. These were then used to isolate 16 distinct underlying...

DNA-based information is a new interdisciplinary field linking information technology and biotechnology. The field hopes to meet the enormous need for long-term data storage by using DNA as an information storage medium. Despite DNA's promise of strong stability, high storage density and low maintenance cost, however, researchers face problems accurately rewriting digital information encoded in...

A systematic review of 301 academic articles on "cultural ecosystem services" has enabled researchers to identify how these nonmaterial contributions from nature are linked to and significantly affect human well-being. They identified 227 unique pathways through which human interaction with nature positively or negatively affects well-being. These were then used to isolate 16 distinct underlying...

A common weed harbors important clues about how to create drought resistant crops in a world beset by climate change.

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the planet. Matters would remain largely unchanged in terms of evolutionary development in these so-called prokaryotic cells—the bacteria and archaea—for another billion and a half years.

PCR tests, also called molecular tests or nucleic acid tests, are considered the gold standard in detecting the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that gives rise to COVID-19. However, they can take a few days to process, resulting in unnecessary quarantine for negative individuals or delays for those who require proof of negative testing for travel or other commitments. Rapid antigen-detecting...

In recent work published in the journal Horticulture Research, researchers from Northeast Agricultural University and Huazhong Agricultural University characterized a negative regulator of late blight resistance in potato.

Fires, heat waves, floods—the reality of climate change is front and center for millions of Americans. Yet among the downbeat of climate-related disasters, some hopeful news rang out last week with Democrats' surprise announcement of a bill designed to help the country meet its goals of curbing greenhouse gas emissions enough to help the planet avoid the worst projections of global warming.

Researchers at Michigan State University have shown that locusts can not only "smell" the difference between cancer cells and healthy cells, but they can also distinguish between different cancer cell lines. 

We have recently witnessed the stunning images of distant galaxies revealed by the James Webb telescope, which were previously visible only as blurry spots. Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed a novel method for visualizing the proteins secreted by cells with stunning resolution, making it the James Webb version for visualizing single cell protein secretion.

This star-studded image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6638 in the constellation Sagittarius. The star-strewn observation highlights the density of stars at the heart of globular clusters, which are stable, tightly bound groups of tens of thousands to millions of stars. To capture the data in this image, Hubble used two of its cutting-edge...

Despite signs of wear, the intrepid spacecraft is about to start an exciting new chapter of its mission as it climbs a Martian mountain.

Alongside cultural heavyweights such as Disney's "Encanto" and Warner Brothers' "The Batman," a short film created at Goddard shares the screen next week at a festival honoring standout works of computer animated storytelling.

NASA's ShadowCam is heading to the Moon aboard Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI)'s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission. KPLO, also known as Danuri, launched at 7:08 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Launch Complex 40 on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 4.

A new map in Oregon that rated the wildfire risk of every tax lot in the state—labeling nearly 80,000 structures as high-risk—generated so much pushback from angry homeowners that officials abruptly retracted it, saying they had not done enough local outreach before publicizing the ambitious project.

Noxious gases from an Icelandic volcano threaten to pollute the air of a nearby village and risk spreading to the capital Reykjavik, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said on Friday.

Adam Wraight pulled a blue sewage "warning" sign out of the sand near Imperial Beach Pier on Thursday morning, replacing it with the more ominous yellow and red placard telling beachgoers that waters were officially closed.

Ultrafast pulses from X-ray lasers reveal how atoms move at timescales of a femtosecond. That's a quadrillionth of a second. However, measuring the properties of the pulses themselves is challenging. While determining a pulse's maximum strength, or 'amplitude,' is straightforward, the time at which the pulse reaches the maximum, or 'phase,' is often hidden. A new study trains neural networks to...