Science

More than 6,700 confirmed cases and 11,500 potential cases of cyclosporiasis have been reported to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 45 states since May, and the summer is not over. The cases are not one outbreak but at least six separate clusters. The largest, nearly 1,950 people across nine states, has […]

A fruit fly hunting the source of a pleasant smell behaves less like a bloodhound and more like an ant returning to its nest. It does not follow the scent’s gradient upward, nose to the wind, the way textbooks have described plume tracking for decades. Instead, it remembers the direction back to the edge of […]

Later this year, the music of the Laidlaw Memorial Pipe Band, based in the Oxfordshire town of Banbury, will be transmitted to the Moon and stored in a data center on the lunar surface. The plan, developed by Lonestar Data Holdings in collaboration with the band, is the cultural payload on a mission whose primary […]

In 2024, three researchers at New York University taught a small transformer to solve a hard algorithmic problem by substituting strings of meaningless dots for its written chain of thought. Its accuracy on a problem called 3SUM jumped from near-random to perfect. The experiment, by Jacob Pfau, William Merrill, and Samuel Bowman, was a deliberately […]

When galaxies cluster together, the space between them, emptier than any vacuum engineers have created, fills with gas: not cold hydrogen, but plasma heated to tens of millions of degrees. Astronomers call this the intracluster medium, or ICM, and have studied it for decades in mature clusters close enough to examine in detail. How this […]

A molecule that stores information, folds itself into working shapes, and reshapes itself when a signal arrives would be a gift to any engineer of the very small. Biology has been hiding one in plain sight. RNA, long treated as the passive courier that carries instructions between DNA and the protein factories of the cell, […]

Susumu Tonegawa, who died on July 11 at the age of 86, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for solving one of the great puzzles of immunology, then spent the next three decades doing the same for memory. The two halves of his career look like a single scientific method applied twice. Asked […]

The Ebola outbreak that has been spreading across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda since May has now surpassed 3,200 confirmed cases and 1,400 deaths, making it the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded after the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic. It is caused not by the Zaire ebolavirus, the species that killed more than […]

The comforting story about artificial intelligence in science holds that automation will remove the drudgery and researchers will use the reclaimed time to think more deeply and finish their work more completely. A new modeling study argues this story gets the economics exactly backwards. By making scientists faster, large language models raise the price of […]

Two randomized trials published in the past six weeks have tested whether drugs taken during acute SARS-CoV-2 infection can prevent long COVID. One trial succeeded by its own statistical standard. The other did not. Together they offer the first randomized evidence that early pharmacologic intervention can reduce the risk of persistent post-infection illness; the pattern […]