Sunbirds’ dazzling feathers are hot, in both senses of the word
The birds’ flashy, iridescent feathers heat up more than other types of feathers, possibly making it harder to stay cool in hot, sunny conditions. If...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
Vera Rubin’s work on dark matter led to a paradigm shift in cosmology
Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and BeyondAshley Jean YeagerMIT Press, $24.95 Vera Rubin’s research forced cosmologists to radically reimagine the cosmos. In the 1960s and...
A 1,000-year-old grave may have held a powerful nonbinary person
For decades, a roughly 1,000-year-old grave in southern Finland has been thought to have held a powerful woman who might have been a warrior....
Jupiter’s intense auroras superheat its upper atmosphere
Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is hundreds of degrees warmer than expected. After a decades-long search, scientists may have pinned down a likely source of that...
Probiotics help lab corals survive deadly heat stress
Warming seas threaten to turn coral reefs from kaleidoscopes of color into bleached fields of rubble. To stop this degradation, some scientists are exploring...
How different COVID-19 testing plans can help keep kids safe in school
Backpack? Check. Notebooks and pencils? Check. Coronavirus test? Check. As fall approaches, many parents and teachers hope to leave Zoom school behind and have...
Measuring a black hole’s mass isn’t easy. A new technique could change that
An actively feeding black hole surrounds itself with a disk of hot gas and dust that flickers like a campfire. Astronomers have now found...
How the strange idea of ‘statistical significance’ was born
In the middle of the 20th century, the field of psychology had a problem. In the wake of the Manhattan Project and in the...
An Indigenous people in the Philippines have the most Denisovan DNA
Denisovans are an elusive bunch, known mainly from ancient DNA samples and traces of that DNA that the ancient hominids shared when they interbred...
Scientists have a new word for birds stealing animal hair
Some tiny birds take bold risks to gather a beakful of hair for their nests. Titmice have been spotted dive-bombing cats, alighting on dozing...
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