A few simple tricks make fake news stories stick in the brain
Bad information isn’t new. Propagandists and scam artists have been selling their brand of proverbial snake oil for ages, all to bend people’s thinking...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
2,500 years ago, the philosopher Anaxagoras brought science’s spirit to Athens
It doesn’t appear that anybody has noticed yet, but 2021 marks a rather important anniversary in the history of science and western civilization. It...
Meet three moderators fighting disinformation on Reddit’s largest coronavirus forum
Combating misinformation online is an ongoing challenge for big tech, and it’s especially difficult when it’s on a discussion board with millions of people...
The surge in U.S. coronavirus cases shows a shift in who’s getting sick
When COVID-19 cases once again began rising in the United States this spring, it may have felt like déjà vu, a repeat of the...
Nanoscale nutrients can protect plants from fungal diseases
Chances are, most — if not all — of the produce in your kitchen is threatened by fungal diseases. The threat looms large for...
The book ‘Viral BS’ offers a cure for medical myths and fake health news
Viral BSSeema YasminJohns Hopkins Univ., $24.95 How does misinformation spread? What causes medical myths and pseudoscience to rapidly infect and fester in society? Seema...
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter’s mission with Perseverance has been extended
The Ingenuity helicopter proved it could fly on Mars. Now it has loftier goals. Having passed all its original engineering tests, the tiny spacecraft...
Little Foot’s shoulders hint at how a human-chimp common ancestor climbed
Little Foot, a nearly complete hominid skeleton painstakingly excavated from rock inside a South African cave, shouldered a powerful evolutionary load. This 3.67-million-year-old adult...
Wild donkeys and horses engineer water holes that help other species
Water drives the rhythms of desert life, but animals aren’t always helpless against the whims of weather. In the American southwest, wild donkeys and...
Lightning may be an important source of air-cleaning chemicals
Lightning could play an important role in flushing pollutants out of the atmosphere. Observations from a storm-chasing airplane reveal that lightning can forge lots...
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’ 
After post-pandemic improvement, youth unemployment is rising again