The oldest known piece of Earth? A 4.4 billion-year-old zirconJohn Valley, University of Wisconsin-Madison Until recently, many discounted the idea that life could have existed on Earth before 3.8 billion years ago because it was thought that heavy pummelling from...
Red meat may be best enjoyed in moderationAnton Vierietin/Getty Images In the ever-evolving and confusing world of nutrition science, a new study has linked eating meat to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Red and processed meat in particular...
Quantum effects result in particles behaving like waves that interfere with each otherShutterstock/sakkmesterke The fuzziness of the quantum world has been demonstrated on its largest-ever scale, probing the limits of quantum mechanics. More than a billion atoms inside a glass...
August 20, 20243 min readEurope's JUICE Jupiter Probe Zooms past the Moon in Historic FlybyThe Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer spacecraft took a shortcut to the giant planet by way of the Earth and the moonBy Mike Wall & SPACE.comAn image...
“I only drink coffee on days ending in y,” so the saying goes. If this mantra applies to you, welcome to the club. Coffee’s best-known component, caffeine, is estimated to be the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world,...
Petunias have never done much for me. If you had told me that one day, I’d fork over more than $50 for a single petunia plant, my eyes would have rolled out of my head. But this plant was special....
One evening in late 1997, 11-year-old Claire Lackner walked into her dad’s study looking for an idea for an experiment for her sixth-grade science class. Her dad, Klaus Lackner, happened to be a physicist working on nuclear fusion at Los...
August 20, 20244 min readScience Improves When People Realize They Were WrongScience means being able to change your mind in light of new evidenceBy Naomi Oreskes Many traits that are expected of scientists—dispassion, detachment, prodigious attention to detail, putting caveats...
Most of the matter in our universe is invisible. We can measure the gravitational pull of this “dark matter” on the orbits of stars and galaxies. We can see the way it bends light around itself and can detect its...
August 20, 20243 min readNew Insights on Dinosaurs, Pain and Carbon CaptureHow we’ll learn more about dark matter, quantum gravity and substitutes for lab animalsBy Laura Helmuth Scientific American, September 2024A 1974 essay called “What Is It Like to Be...
