Science

Two weeks after scientists announced that the humpback chub had staged a historic comeback in the western Grand Canyon, the Bureau of Reclamation canceled the cold-water releases that protect the fish from an invasive predator. The timing captures, in miniature, the dilemma now squeezing the entire Colorado River system: a river so depleted that the […]

The family of superconductors that broke the liquid-nitrogen barrier three years ago has a new high-water mark: a nickelate showing superconducting signatures at 100.5 K, the highest ever reported for this class of materials. But the advance reported today in Nature Communications is not just a new number on a temperature ladder. The paper, from […]

Heat flows from hot to cold, a rule so reliable it is enshrined in the second law of thermodynamics. In an experiment reported in Physical Review Letters, however, researchers coaxed heat to flow the other way, from a cold system to a hotter one, while simultaneously extracting work from the machine. The device behind this […]

Rivers look like accidents of geology: water finds a path downhill, carves a channel, and the result is a sprawling, irregular network of tributaries. Yet hidden in that apparent chaos is one of the most persistent numbers in geomorphology. Across continents, climates, and rock types, the length of a river scales with the area it […]

Peer review rests on a single scarce resource: the unpaid attention of working scientists, and that resource is being rationed thinner every year. Publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science are growing at roughly 5.6 percent per year, a rate some analyses describe as exponential. Estimates put the collective time researchers spend reviewing at […]

Somewhere over the North Atlantic west of Iceland on Wednesday, two people in pressurized suits will fly a 1960s-era NASA research jet into the path of the Moon’s shadow, throttle up to stay inside it, and buy themselves nearly three minutes of artificial night. The mission, flown from Keflavík airport with a crew of two […]

The number that best describes the state of the planet right now is not an air temperature but 20.96 degrees Celsius (69.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the average surface temperature of the world’s extra-polar oceans in July, as computed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service from its ERA5 reanalysis. It is the warmest July in the satellite […]

A dog looking at a human face does not just register happy versus unhappy. According to a new brain-imaging study from the University of Vienna and collaborators, a dog’s brain treats fear as something distinct from anger and sadness, while anger and sadness produce patterns that are nearly indistinguishable from each other. The finding, published […]

The next front in the weight-loss drug wars may be a pill, not a syringe. Aleniglipron, an experimental oral medication from Structure Therapeutics, produced up to 12.1 percent mean weight loss over 36 weeks in a 230-patient phase 2b trial published June 5 in Nature Medicine. The result places the small-molecule drug in the race […]

A study of 340,924 British adults followed for an average of 13.4 years has found a sharp divide in how different alcoholic drinks relate to mortality: moderate wine drinking tracked a 21 percent lower risk of cardiovascular death, while even low-level consumption of beer, cider or spirits tracked a 9 percent higher risk. Heavy drinking, […]