On astrophysicists’ charts of star stuff, there’s a substance that still merits the label “here be dragons.” That poorly understood material is found inside neutron stars — the collapsed remnants of once-mighty stars — and is now being mapped out, as scientists better characterize the weird matter. The detection of two colliding neutron stars, announced […]

Galileo’s most famous experiment has taken a trip to outer space. The result? Einstein was right yet again. The experiment confirms a tenet of Einstein’s theory of gravity with greater precision than ever before. According to science lore, Galileo dropped two balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that they fell at the […]

Immediately after a 19-year-old shot and killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at a Florida high school on Valentine’s Day, people leaped to explain what had caused the latest mass slaughter. By now, it’s a familiar drill: Too many readily available guns. Too much untreated mental illness. Too much warped masculinity. Don’t forget those […]

Black holes have been beguiling from the very beginning. Hinted at as early as the 1780s and predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they didn’t get the name we know today until the 1960s. Bizarre beasts that squash gobs of matter into infinitely dense abysses, black holes were once thought to be merely a […]

A surprise ingredient may explain how lemon juice puts the squeeze on kidney stones. Lemons contain nanoparticles that, when fed to rats, block stone formation, scientists report in the Feb. 22 Nano Letters. If the tiny sacs do the same for humans, the nanoparticles might one day offer a way to prevent kidney stones in […]

A new atlas of human genetic diversity reveals what human ancestors’ DNA may have looked like before people migrated out of Africa. Ancestral humans carried 40.7 million more DNA base pairs than people do today, researchers report online August 6 in Science. That’s enough DNA to build a small chromosome, says study coauthor Evan Eichler, […]

A close look at one protein shows how it moves molecular passengers into cells in the kidneys, brain and elsewhere. The protein LRP2 is part of a delivery service, catching certain molecules outside a cell and ferrying them in. Now, 3-D maps of LRP2 reveal the protein’s structure and how it captures and releases molecules, […]

In the early morning of February 6, a devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey, near the border with Syria. Numerous aftershocks followed, the strongest nearly rivaling the power of the main quake, at magnitude 7.5. By evening, the death toll had climbed to more than 3,700 across both countries, according to Reuters, and was […]

Pfizer is racing to get approval for its COVID-19 vaccine, applying for emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on November 20. But the pharmaceutical giant faces a huge challenge in distributing its vaccine, which has to be kept an ultrafrosty –70° Celsius, requiring special storage freezers and shipping containers. It “has […]