How to detect, resist and counter the flood of fake news
From lies about election fraud to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine falsehoods, misinformation is racing through our democracy. And it is dangerous. Awash in...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
Some viruses thwart bacterial defenses with a unique genetic alphabet
Some bacteria-killing viruses spell out their genetic instructions in a different DNA alphabet. More than 40 years ago, scientists in Russia reported that a...
A child’s 78,000-year-old grave marks Africa’s oldest known human burial
A child whose lifeless body was carefully placed in an East African cave around 78,300 years ago has made a grand return. Researchers who...
A rare glimpse of a star before it went supernova defies expectations
A rare glimpse of a star before it exploded in a fiery supernova looks nothing like astronomers expected, a new study suggests. Images from...
How a small city in Brazil may reveal how fast vaccines can curb COVID-19
The city of Serrana in Brazil is a living experiment. The picturesque place, surrounded by sugarcane fields, is nestled in the southeast of one...
Here’s what breakthrough infections reveal about COVID-19 vaccines
As around 2 million people a day across the United States receive a dose of one of three COVID-19 vaccines, cases of the disease...
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...
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...
As Sudan war spills into Central African Republic, UN warns against early peacekeeper exit 
AI on track to ‘crowd out’ human decision-making in warfare 
From Small Islands to Antalya: COP31 Must Move Climate Promises from Paper to People 
‘One step away from famine’: Inside Afghanistan’s hunger crisis