Science

[:eu]For decades, physicists have known that particles called neutrinos, which have almost no mass and barely interact with other matter, come in three types—electron, muon, and tau. And for just as long, some theorists have argued that there could exist a fourth, sterile neutrino that would be even weirder and more inert than its familiar…

[:eu]For the past 20 years, physicists have known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as if some bizarre “dark energy” is blowing up space like a balloon. In fact, cosmologists’ well-tested standard model assumes that 69% of the content of the universe is dark energy. However, there may be no need for the…

[:eu]Astronomers have just spied a black hole with a mass one billion times the Sun’s hurtling toward our galaxy. But scientists aren’t worried about it making contact: It’s some 8 billion light-years away from Earth and traveling at less than 1% the speed of light. Instead, they’re wondering how it got the boot from its…

[:eu]If lakes are shallower, they would release more methane into the atmosphere than previously estimated.[:]

[:eu]Tlaxcallan is one of several premodern societies around the world that archaeologists believe were organized collectively, where rulers shared power and commoners had a say in the government that presided over their lives.[:]

[:eu]The objects and people children play with as early as toddlerhood may provide clues to their eventual sexual orientation, reveals the largest study of its kind. The investigation, which tracked more than 4500 kids over the first 15 years of their lives, seeks to answer one of the most controversial questions in the social sciences,…

[:eu]By making assumptions about how the push and pull of energy and matter in the universe have changed the rate of cosmic expansion since the microwave background was formed, the astrophysicists can take their map and adjust the Hubble constant to the present-day, local universe. The numbers should match. But they don’t.[:]

[:eu]Using images from NASA’s orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has deduced in unprecedented detail the distributions of dark matter within three clusters of galaxies. [:]

[:eu]A few years ago, Christopher Hamm was reading up on monarch butterflies when he noticed something peculiar. All of the scientific articles that mentioned the number of the insect’s chromosomes—30, it seemed—referenced a 2004 paper, which in turn cited a 1975 paper. But when Hamm, then a postdoc at the University of Kansas in Lawrence,…