Science

The perpetual shortage of human organs for transplant has researchers turning to farm animals. Several biotech companies are genetically engineering pigs to make their organs more compatible with the human body. But some scientists are pursuing a different solution: growing fully human organs in pigs, sheep, or other animals, which could then be harvested for…

In what may be a cautionary tale for citizen scientists trying to save North America’s iconic monarch butterfly, new research has found that butterflies raised in captivity are sometimes unable to migrate—some as a result of missing genes and others for want of the right environmental cues.

A growing sensory smog threatens the ability of fish to communicate, navigate, and survive

Robots might not yet make great standup comedians, but computers are learning to predict what we’ll find funny, according to a study presented here last week at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

Much like Earth’s seas, the subsurface ocean of this icy moon of Jupiter contains sodium chloride, the main ingredient of table salt

When scientists talk about recent extinctions, birds and mammals get most of the attention. But the first global analysis of its kind finds that twice as many plants have disappeared than birds, mammals, and amphibians combined.

From elephant-size animals that browsed North American grasslands to moose-size swimmers that plied the Pacific coast of South America, sloths have roamed Earth for more than 50 million years. Yet scientists know little about how the dozens of known species are related to each other. Now, two new analyses of ancient sloth DNA and proteins—some…

If papers published in the past 6 months are right, a single number is enough to show whether people are likely to suffer a premature heart attack, land first authorship on published papers, become dependent on alcohol, or put on fat around the middle. That magic number is the ratio between the lengths of the…

Genes are a powerful driver of risk for autism, but some researchers suspect another factor is also at play: the set of bacteria that inhabits the gut. That idea has been controversial, but a new study offers support for this gut-brain link. It reveals that mice develop autismlike behaviors when they are colonized by microbes…