Science

NASA’s next step in solar sail technology is its largest yet, and it is being built to serve as an early warning sentinel for space weather. The Space Storm Solar Sail Sentinel (S5) will feature a sail measuring 1,653 square meters, roughly the area of an Olympic swimming pool, made of aluminum-coated plastic just 2.5 […]

A new global analysis reveals a blind spot in climate accounting: the millions of ponds, farm dams, and small reservoirs that dot agricultural landscapes worldwide. Though they cover only 6% of the Earth’s inland water surface area, these small water bodies (SWBs) contribute 28% of global inland water methane emissions and 15% of carbon dioxide […]

The most expensive dinosaur ever sold now has a name: Gus. On July 14, a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex specimen, nicknamed “Gus” after the rancher on whose land it was discovered, sold at Sotheby’s New York for $50.1 million, more than doubling the previous record of $31.8 million set by the T. rex specimen “Stan” in […]

For decades, the textbook model of retinal signal processing was simple: the eye’s photoreceptors feed into bipolar cells, which feed into retinal ganglion cells, which send signals to the brain, each pathway running in parallel, independent and isolated. That model has just been overturned. A team of Yale neuroscientists led by Z. Jimmy Zhou and […]

Alcohol kills more Americans than all illicit drugs combined. Yet as STAT News concludes its eight-part investigative series “The Deadliest Drug,” the gap between the scale of the problem and the scale of the response has never been wider. The final installment, published July 14 by reporters Isabella Cueto and Lev Facher, distills more than […]

The Federal Trade Commission on July 14 finalized a landmark settlement with CVS Caremark, the pharmacy benefit manager accused of artificially inflating insulin prices, the second such settlement the agency has secured in the Biden-Trump era’s most aggressive antitrust push into prescription drug middlemen. The settlement, approved by FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson in a 1-0-1 […]

A confidential research and development agreement between the Biden administration and Gilead Sciences, obtained by HIV advocacy group PrEP4All through a 15-month Freedom of Information Act battle and reported by STAT News on July 13, has reignited criticism of the lame-duck settlement that ended a years-long patent dispute over the HIV prevention drug Truvada. Advocates […]

Archaeologists have unearthed five pairs of iron shackles at a 2,300-year-old Celtic settlement in the Loire Valley of France, providing rare direct evidence of slavery in pre-Roman Gaul. The discovery, announced July 9 by France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), sheds light on a dimension of Celtic society that has remained largely invisible […]

By Marie A major new clinical trial has replicated the finding that multidomain lifestyle interventions can protect against cognitive decline in older adults at risk for dementia, this time in a culturally and genetically distinct population across 11 Latin American countries. The LatAm-FINGERS (Latin American Initiative for Lifestyle Intervention to Prevent Cognitive Decline) study, presented […]

By Marie Programmable photonic processors, chips that manipulate light through arrays of interconnected waveguides, promise faster, more energy-efficient computing for both classical and quantum applications. But they have a persistent problem: fabrication imperfections mean every chip behaves slightly differently, and calibrating them to perform arbitrary computations is notoriously difficult. A new preprint from researchers at […]