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...
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
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...
Colds and other common respiratory diseases might surge as kids return to school
As U.S. schools resume in-person learning this fall, parents and administrators may have to deal with more outbreaks of colds and other seasonal respiratory...
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Global Survey Finds Deep Crisis of Trust as Majority Say Economic System Favours the Rich 
These deep-sea spiders give off an otherworldly glow 
These neutrinos from the sun have the lowest energies ever seen