Science

A team of astronomers was stunned to discover what is, in galactic terms, a monstrous baby: a gigantic black hole of 12 billion solar masses in a barely newborn galaxy, just 875 million years after the big bang.

It may sound radical, but it works: Eating peanuts slashes the chance of a peanut allergy, at least in children at high risk of developing one, a much-anticipated study finds. The results are likely to catapult a long-standing theory—that ingesting potential food allergens is a way to prevent allergies—into mainstream medicine.

Our DNA may encode all the instructions needed to build the human body and keep it running, but each of our cells must follow just a subset of those instructions in order for the body to work properly. Thanks to the $300 million, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap Epigenomics Project, researchers have now identified…

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back, and it’s better than ever. The particle accelerator, located at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, shut down in February 2013, and since then scientists have been upgrading and repairing it and its particle detectors. The LHC will be back up to full speed this May.

When a person dies from cancer, the culprit is usually not the original tumor but rather the cancerous cells that spread throughout the body and replicate in distant organs, a process called metastasis. Researchers have long known that metastasizing cancer cells slip their bonds and avoid immune detection by altering the sugars on their surfaces.…

Researchers have found that Earth belches a potent greenhouse gas known as tetrafluoromethane (CF4) during earthquakes and other tectonic events. The emissions likely aren’t making a significant contribution to global warming, but the findings could change the way scientists model future climate scenarios. They also complicate the use of CF4 as a way to measure…

This bird might look like a holiday ornament, but it is actually a rare half-female, half-male northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, pictured with female plumage on the left and male plumage on the right) spotted a few years ago in Rock Island, Illinois

If you compare a chimpanzee’s bones with those of a modern human, one difference will immediately jump out at you. Chimp bones are densely packed with microscopic structures known as spongy bone. Human bones aren’t. That relative lack of spongy bone makes our skeletons lighter and increases our risk of fractures and osteoporosis. But weaker…

There are places on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko where cauliflowerlike textures appear in the dusty crust, like goose bumps under the skin. Scientists using theRosetta spacecraft—which arrived at 67P in August and became the first mission to orbit and land on a comet—now think they may have discovered the source of these patterns on cliff faces and…