How extreme heat from climate change distorts human behavior
On a sweltering summer afternoon almost a decade ago, Meenu Tewari was visiting a weaving company in Surat in western India. Tewari, an urban...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
A well-known wildflower turns out to be a secret carnivore
Gleaming, gluey, deathtrap hairs have betrayed the secret identity of a well-known wildflower: It’s a carnivore. A species of false asphodel (Triantha occidentalis)uses enzyme-secreting...
New studies hint that the coronavirus may be evolving to become more airborne
Small aerosol particles spewed while people breathe, talk and sing may contain more coronavirus than larger moisture droplets do. And the coronavirus may be...
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...
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...
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’