SEATTLE — The next generation exoplanet hunter is coming into its own. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has already found eight confirmed planets in its first four months of observing — and some are unlike anything astronomers have seen before. “The torrent of data is starting to flow already,” TESS principal investigator George […]

Poop contains a lot of valuable scientific information. Researchers can monitor microbes, track enzyme activity or hunt for DNA to gather clues about overall health. There’s so much one can learn from the waste product that microbiologist Aadra Bhatt at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill decided there should be a word for […]

A few months back, a new storefront appeared in my small Oregon town. Its shelves were packed with tinctures, jars of salve, coffee beans, bath bombs — even beard oil. This motley collection shared a single star ingredient: CBD. Produced by the cannabis plant, CBD is the straitlaced cousin of marijuana’s more famous component — […]

Robot revolution?Educational robots could help students learn new skills and good study habits. But researchers still have a lot to learn about the potential risks involved when young kids keep close company with such robots, Maria Temming reported in “Robots are becoming classroom tutors. But will they make the grade?” (SN: 2/16/19, p. 16).The story […]

For 40 years, they’ve held the front line in Florida’s fight against mosquito-borne diseases. And it turns out that the chickens standing sentinel in cities, marshes, woodlands and residential backyards are clucking good at their job. Last year, chickens in 268 coops in over a third of Florida’s counties provided scientists weekly blood samples that […]

This is what a black hole looks like. A world-spanning network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope zoomed in on the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 to create this first-ever picture of a black hole. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black […]

WASHINGTON — In 2021, wildfires pillaged the world’s carbon-rich snow forests. That year, burning boreal forests released 1.76 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, researchers reported March 2 in a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That’s a new record for the region, which stores about […]

Full-grown snapping shrimp were already known to have some of the fastest claws under the waves. But it turns out they’re nothing compared with their kids. Juvenile snapping shrimp produce the highest known underwater accelerations of any reusable body part, researchers report February 28 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. While the claws’ top speed […]

It took just a 9-volt battery and a little brain zapping to turn science writer Sally Adee into a stone-cold sharpshooter. She had flown out to California to test an experimental DARPA technology that used electric jolts to speed soldiers’ sniper training. When the juice was flowing, Adee could tell. In a desert simulation that […]

The April 25 Nepal earthquake killed more than 8,000 people and caused several billion dollars in damage, but new research suggests the toll could have been a lot worse. GPS readings taken during the quake indicate that most of the tremors vibrated through the ground as long shakes rather than quick pulses. That largely spared […]