‘Ice Rivers’ invites you to get to know our world’s melting glaciers
Ice RiversJemma WadhamPrinceton Univ., $26.95 I’ve always been a sucker for glacier lingo, whimsical words for a harsh landscape gouged, smoothed and bulldozed by...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
Rice feeds half the world. Climate change’s droughts and floods put it at risk
Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty, barren plot of land, parched soil crunching...
‘Ghost tracks’ suggest people came to the Americas earlier than once thought
Footprints left behind by prehistoric people may be some of the strongest evidence yet that humans arrived in the Americas earlier than previously thought....
Bloodthirsty vampire bats like to drink with friends over strangers
Vampire bats may be bloodthirsty, but that doesn’t mean they can’t share a drink with friends. Fights can erupt among bats over gushing wounds...
DNA offers a new look at how Polynesia was settled
Polynesian voyagers settled islands across a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean within about 500 years, leaving a genetic trail of the routes that...
Whirling maple seeds inspired these tiny flying sensors
Like helicoptering maple seeds, tiny new fliers whirl gracefully as they glide. The miniature aircraft, which can be made as small as a grain...
Why only some people may get COVID-19 booster shots at first
In the United States, it’s looking like booster shots of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine won’t be widely available to the general public starting this week....
Luis Miramontes helped enable the sexual revolution. Why isn’t he better known?
When Mexican scientist Luis Miramontes signed his lab notebook on October 15, 1951, he didn’t know he was documenting history. That day, he made...
One of nature’s key constants is much larger in a quantum material
A crucial number that rules the universe goes big in a strange quantum material. The fine-structure constant is about 10 times its normal value...
Pfizer says its COVID-19 vaccine is safe and works well for kids ages 5–11
Elementary school–age children may soon be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German biotech company partner BioNTech reported September...
A new treatment could restore some mobility in people paralyzed by strokes 
What has Perseverance found in two years on Mars? 
This robot automatically tucks its limbs to squeeze through spaces 
Greta Thunberg’s new book urges the world to take climate action now