Science

In February, the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience referred to an idea made famous by some books and TV shows: that an image of the Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, carved onto the lid of his sarcophagus when he died in 683 C.E., shows him taking off in a spaceship. Host Rogan was skeptical…

More than half a billion years ago, our planet was a giant snowball hurtling through space. Glaciers blanketed the globe all the way to the equator in one of the mysterious “Snowball Earth” events geologists think occurred at least twice in Earth’s ancient past. Now, scientists have found that the final snowball episode likely ended…

Talk about getting something for nothing. Physicists predict that just by shooting charged particles through an electromagnetic field, it should be possible to generate light from the empty vacuum. In principle, the effect could provide a new way to test the fundamental theory of electricity and magnetism, known as quantum electrodynamics, the most precise theory…

“Futile”—that’s the devastating label now attached to two highly anticipated clinical trials of a drug that targets β-amyloid, the neuron-killing protein fragment littering the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Eisai in Tokyo, the pharmaceutical partners developing the drug, called aducanumab, today announced their decision to halt a pair of…

Japan will allow gene-edited foodstuffs to be sold to consumers without safety evaluations as long as the techniques involved meet certain criteria, if recommendations agreed on by an advisory panel yesterday are adopted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. This would open the door to using CRISPR and other techniques on plants and…

Researchers have been finding them for decades: bones that are too heavy or too light; too long or too short; twisted, perforated, or studded with protruding growth. They’re a sign that someone in the past suffered from a rare disease, often defined today as affecting fewer than one in 2000 people, such as dwarfism or…

Medieval sub-Saharan Africa’s few written records make no mention of plague, and the region lacks mass graves resembling the “plague pits” of Europe. Nor did European explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries record any sign of the disease, even though outbreaks continued to beset Europe. Now, some researchers point to new evidence from archaeology,…

Timothy Ray Brown, aka the “Berlin patient,” the only person to be cured of HIV, may finally have company. A decade after Brown became famous thanks to a stem cell transplant that eliminated his HIV infection, a similar transplant from a donor who has HIV-resistant cells appears to have cured another man, dubbed the “London…

If humans hope to limit climate change to just 2°C of warming, we’ve got a lot of work to do, scientists say: reducing emissions, planting trees, and scrubbing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the skies with the latest technologies. Now, a new process can convert gaseous CO2—the product of burning fossil fuels—into solid carbon at room…