What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A pair of American satellites built to catch the Soviets cheating on a nuclear test ban kept detecting unexplained flashes, and the flashes turned out to be the most powerful explosions in the universe coming from billions of light-years away
A remarkable new study suggests pigeons may navigate using their liver — solving a decades-long mystery about how birds find their way home across hundreds of miles by pointing to an organ no one had been looking at
A single aspen grove in Utah called Pando is one organism sharing a 106-acre root system and 47,000 genetically identical trunks, weighs roughly 6,000 tons, and has been quietly cloning itself for somewhere between 9,000 and 80,000 years while every visible trunk above it lives and dies on a 130-year cycle.
A new meta-analysis suggests omega-3 may reduce both hot-headed reactive aggression and the cooler, planned kind — and researchers say the finding is consistent across demographics
Psilocybin research is no longer just for hard-to-treat cases — a new trial targeted recurrent depression in people who had not failed standard treatment, and the results are promising
The gold in an ordinary wedding ring was not made on Earth, or even inside an ordinary star, but in the most violent events in the universe, the collisions of dead stars and the flares of magnetised neutron stars, long before the Sun was born and the cloud that became our solar system took shape.
The science of why some people seem to age dramatically slower than others is mostly the science of one thing — cumulative sun exposure — and what looks like good genes in someone's seventies is usually fifty years of quiet sun protection that nobody, including the person, ever consciously planned
When a Scottish sheep named Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 — cloned from a single cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe — she became the first mammal ever produced from an adult body cell, proving something developmental biologists had spent decades insisting was impossible
In 2018, a Chinese biophysicist announced he had gene-edited twin girls using CRISPR. The scientific consensus is that what he actually did was something else
Social science has a replication problem — a new massive study found that only half of published findings hold up when researchers try to repeat them and many that made it into textbooks
