Science

Fewer than 10 vaquita porpoises remain in the wild, the world’s rarest marine mammal, confined to a shrinking pocket of the northern Gulf of California. Now, a team led by Florida Atlantic University has created a lasting record of the species: a high-resolution 3D digital archive of a complete vaquita skeleton, freely available to researchers, […]

A cruise ship passenger exposed to Andes hantavirus has been ordered to remain in a secure quarantine facility in Nebraska by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., overriding the conclusion of an HHS-appointed medical reviewer who found she could safely finish her isolation at home in Florida. The case has drawn sharp […]

Deep beneath Cajon Pass, a mountain corridor 63 miles northeast of Los Angeles where the San Andreas Fault and the San Jacinto Fault intersect, the crust is under more stress than at any point in the last 1,000 years. A new physics-based earthquake cycle model, published June 3 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid […]

There is a question that has hovered over every wave of workplace automation, from the calculator to the spreadsheet to the search engine: do these tools make us better, or do they make us dependent? The answer, for artificial intelligence, is arriving in the form of peer-reviewed studies, and the early results are sobering. A […]

On June 19, two stories from different ends of the PFAS research pipeline converged in The Guardian, and together they paint a stark picture of the burden these “forever chemicals” place on human health. The first story is about a community in Lancashire living in the shadow of a factory that released 49 tonnes of […]

What if an animal could live 25 times longer than its closest relatives, and in old age show no sign of weakening? That is exactly what a team led by the University of Bristol and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has documented in a genus of tropical butterflies, and the secret, it turns out, is […]

When the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, few in the scientific community expected the rupture to last as long or cut as deep as it did. Nearly a decade later, a detailed accounting in Nature by reporter Elizabeth Gibney shows that European research collaboration is healing, but far from whole. Published […]

Every human cell carries thousands of genetic mutations, most of which cause no noticeable harm. For decades, this was a puzzle: how can the genome tolerate so much variation without collapsing into disease? The answer, it turns out, lies in a class of molecular chaperones, proteins whose job is to keep other proteins properly folded, […]

A fungus called Sporothrix brasiliensis has been spreading through South America for three decades, sickening and killing thousands of cats and infecting more than 11,000 people. At the ASM Microbe meeting in Washington on June 7, CDC senior adviser Shawn Lockhart delivered a stark warning: it is not a matter of if, but when, it […]

Fifteen minutes after the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake devastated Japan on March 11, 2011, an S-wave that had traveled through the Earth’s mantle, reflected off the liquid outer core, and returned to the surface arrived beneath the Japanese archipelago. Its amplitude, peak-to-peak, exceeded one centimeter. It set off a slow slip along the country’s plate […]