Science

Just weeks after the discovery of the second-ever comet from outside of our solar system (the first was the cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua), astronomers have detected gas emitted from its surface—the first hint of what an interstellar traveler is made of.

Archaeologists and architects alike have long wondered why 15th century Incans built the grand citadel of Machu Picchu where they did, high in the remote Andes atop a narrow ridge in what is now Peru. One simple answer, researchers now suggest, is that that’s where building materials for the site—large amounts of already fractured rock—were…

How many fish really appear in the photo collage above? The answer bears on whether a study about lionfish social behavior, published in Biology Letters in 2014, was fabricated—and whether Oona Lönnstedt, a marine biologist formerly at Uppsala University (UU) in Sweden who made up data in a 2016 Science paper, committed an earlier fraud.…

The age of quantum computing may have begun not with a flashy press conference but with an internet leak. According to a paper posted briefly–and presumably mistakenly–to a lab site, physicists at Google have used a quantum computer to perform a calculation that would overwhelm the world’s best conventional supercomputer. Although the specific computation has…

North America’s birds are disappearing from the skies at a rate that’s shocking even to ornithologists. Since the 1970s, the continent has lost 3 billion birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline, U.S. and Canadian researchers report this week online in Science. “It’s staggering,”…

Physicists have set a new limit on the mass of nature’s lightest particle of matter. The neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV)—less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron—say experimenters with the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Reported on 13 September at a…

Solar panels are great for powering devices during the day. But they don’t work after the sun goes down. Now, a new technology that takes advantage of the cold darkness of space may do the trick.

Forget the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged, not beneath an ocean somewhere, but largely below southern Europe.

In the thousands of years we’ve lived with dogs, we’ve transformed them from fearsome wolves to fluffy, tail-wagging Frisbee catchers that range in size from tiny pomeranians to towering great Danes. Now, a new study of dogs’ brain scans suggests our impact on our canine pals has been even more profound: We’ve changed the very…