Science

For most people, the sound of traffic outside the window is a background annoyance, something to tune out. But that relentless thrum of cars, trucks, and buses may be doing more than disturbing a good night’s sleep. According to a landmark study published in JAMA Neurology, long-term exposure to road traffic noise is associated with […]

On July 22, at the inaugural Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C., the Department of Energy announced the first round of grant awards under its ambitious new research program. The headline numbers were striking: 278 awards totaling more than $250 million, drawn from more than 5,000 applications. The selection rate was just 5.6 percent. But […]

Every oncologist has encountered the puzzle. A patient who smoked two packs a day for 50 years dies of a heart attack at 85 with pristine lungs. Another, a nonsmoker who ran marathons and ate kale, is diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer at 42. A woman inherits a BRCA1 mutation that should all but […]

When the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement burst onto the national scene, it arrived with a simple and appealing proposition: the American food system is making people sick, and bold action can fix it. The platform took direct aim at ultra-processed foods, synthetic food dyes, seed oils, and outdated dietary guidelines. It captured the […]

PHILADELPHIA — On July 23, 2026, Jacob Tsimerman received the Fields Medal, mathematics’s most prestigious prize, for his role in proving the Andre-Oort conjecture, a problem that had stumped the world’s best minds for more than 30 years. It was the crowning achievement of a career that began with a perfect score at the International […]

The first time Kathryn Ayres saw it through her GoPro viewfinder, she was witnessing something no scientist had ever filmed. An adult female orca held the tail end of a dead sharp-tail sunfish in her mouth, holding it steady like a sparring partner bracing a practice shield. A second orca, a large male, accelerated toward […]

In 1905, Albert Einstein published four papers that remade physics. Three of them had a single author. One of them, his doctoral dissertation, had no author at all. His famous 1915 paper on general relativity? One author. When Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921, the idea that a lone scientist could reshape the foundations […]

For roughly 40 years, the entire arc of a human pregnancy in the United States was captured by a handful of five-digit numbers. A clinician who managed a vaginal delivery from the first prenatal appointment through the last postpartum checkup billed exactly one code: 59400. A cesarean birth: 59510. A VBAC: 59610. One code, one […]

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising reinstatement and full back pay for every service member discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. The language was unequivocal. The pledge was one of the most sweeping reversals of pandemic-era public health policy ever attempted by a sitting president. Eighteen months later, of the […]

For more than two centuries, the way we think about heat has been governed by a single elegant equation. Joseph Fourier’s law of heat conduction, written in 1822, treats heat as a diffuse fluid that spreads evenly in all directions, flowing from hot to cold like water soaking through sand. It works beautifully for a […]