Auroras form when electrons from space ride waves in Earth’s magnetic field
By re-creating the conditions for an aurora in the lab, researchers have confirmed how these bright, shimmery curtains of light form. The northern lights...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
50 years ago, NASA relaxed quarantine rules for returning moon missions
Lunar quarantine dropped — Science News, May 8, 1971 Spacecraft and men from Earth can contaminate space … with Earth-related material or organisms. But there...
FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug despite controversy over whether it works
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a controversial Alzheimer’s treatment, the first that promises to slow the disease’s destruction in the brain,...
Food that boosts gut microbes could be a new way to help malnourished kids
In the densely populated slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, children survive on rice cooked with curry powder and cheap cookies and chips, packaged in appealing,...
These ferns may be the first plants known to share work like ants
High in the forest canopy, a mass of strange ferns grips a tree trunk, looking like a giant tangle of floppy, viridescent antlers. Below...
Nuclear clocks could outdo atomic clocks as the most precise timepieces
Nuclear clocks could be the GOAT: Greatest of all timepieces. If physicists can build them, nuclear clocks would be a brand-new type of clock,...
After 40 years of AIDS, here’s why we still don’t have an HIV vaccine
Forty years ago, researchers described the mysterious cases of five gay men who had fallen ill with a pneumonia caused by the bacteria Pneumocystis...
How science museums reinvented themselves to survive the pandemic
On January 30, 2020, Science Gallery Dublin assembled a small group of experts to discuss a strange new disease that had recently emerged in...
Something mysteriously wiped out about 90 percent of sharks 19 million years ago
About 19 million years ago, something terrible happened to sharks. Fossils gleaned from sediments in the Pacific Ocean reveal a previously unknown and dramatic...
50 years ago, scientists predicted steady U.S. population growth
Information outflow – Science News, June 5, 1971 The United States’ population is growing at a rate of one percent a year, and even...
Newborn screening for cancer risk could save lives. Should it be done? 
World marks second warmest July on record 
Ebola deaths top 2,000 as scientists race to develop vaccine 
South Sudan: UN mission decries deadly attacks, works to calm tensions after ‘nothing but devastation’