Normally, seeing people walking their dogs in the evening is a common sight in Beijing, including big dogs like golden retrievers, huskies and border collies. But on Monday evening this week, the Global Times only saw one person walking her small teddy bear dog. This might be because of reports that have gone viral on […]

The Chinese Embassy in Pakistan and the Chinese Consulate General in Karachi have strongly condemned an attack on a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a project at Gwadar port, Pakistan on Sunday morning.  The convoy was ambushed by bombs and gunshots on their way from the airport to the port at 9:17 am Sunday […]

For Wisconsin’s snowshoe hares, climate change now ranks as an even bigger menace than the bulldozing, paving and other destructive things people have done to northern forests. Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin […]

A mushroom whose genes have been edited with molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 doesn’t need to be regulated like other genetically modified crops, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said April 13 in a letter to the mushroom’s creator. The edible fungus is the first CRISPR-edited crop to clear USDA regulation. Yinong Yang, a plant pathologist […]

Below most volcanoes, Earth packs some serious deep heat. Mount St. Helens is a standout exception, suggests a new study. Cold rock lurks under this active Washington volcano. Using data from a seismic survey (that included setting off 23 explosions around the volcano), Steven Hansen, a geophysicist at the University of New Mexico, peeked 40 […]

Astronomers have caught a star exploding just hours after light from the eruption first reached Earth. Measurements of the blast’s light suggest that the star rapidly belched gas in the run-up to its demise. That would be surprising — most scientists think the first outward sign of a supernova is the explosion itself. “Several years […]

Certain stealthy spacetime curiosities might be less hidden than thought, potentially exposing themselves to observers in some curved universes. These oddities, known as singularities, are points in space where the standard laws of physics break down. Found at the centers of black holes, singularities are generally expected to be hidden from view, shielding the universe […]

For the first time in the United States, researchers have used gene editing to repair a mutation in human embryos. Molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 corrected a gene defect that can lead to heart failure. The gene editor fixed the mutation in about 72 percent of tested embryos, researchers report August 2 in Nature. That […]

Famously sneaky particles have been caught behaving in a new way. For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos scattering off the nucleus of an atom. The process, predicted more than four decades ago, provides a new way to test fundamental physics. It will also help scientists to better characterize the neutrino, a misfit particle […]

I heard it for the first time a few days ago: “She’s copying me!” my 4-year-old wailed in a righteous complaint about her little sister. And she most certainly was copying, repeating the same nonsense word over and over. While it was distressing to my older kid, I thought it was funny that it took […]