Science

For millions who can’t hear, lip reading offers a window into conversations that would be lost without it. But the practice is hard—and the results are often inaccurate. Now, researchers are reporting a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that outperformed professional lip readers and the best AI to date, with just half the error rate…

If astronomers are right, a ghostly particle that lit up an instrumented swathe of ice beneath the South Pole on 22 September last year was a messenger from a distant galaxy. The particle was a neutrino, electrically neutral and almost massless, which means its path could be traced back to the extragalactic event that created…

Southern Australia’s Strzelecki Desert is home to two very different landscapes: an area of 10-meter-high sand dunes with patches of dense woody shrubs, and—just a few kilometers away—shorter and flatter dunes surrounded by sparse vegetation. The reason for the difference? Dingoes.

Billions of years ago, life crossed a threshold. Single cells started to band together, and a world of formless, unicellular life was on course to evolve into the riot of shapes and functions of multicellular life today, from ants to pear trees to people. It’s a transition as momentous as any in the history of…

Darwin, Newton, Einstein. When scientists reach a certain level of fame, first names need not apply. That’s especially true if the scientist is a man, according to a new study. And it doesn’t just go for scientists: Politicians, athletes, and other high-profile figures are more likely to be referred to by their last names alone…

A recent marriage of three hot fields—ancient DNA, the genome editor CRISPR, and “organoids” built from stem cells—offers a provocative, if very preliminary, new option. At least two research teams are engineering stem cells to include Neanderthal genes and growing them into “minibrains” that reflect the influence of that ancient DNA.

Africa’s baobab tree looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. When young, the species (Adansonia digitata) is single-stemmed, branchless, and sports fruit that resembles giant sausages. Now, researchers report things get even weirder as the tree grows older. Over its lifetime, its roots send up several more stems in a ring, which eventually fuse…

Although we tend to think of evolution as happening over thousands, if not millions, of years, critical changes can take little more than a century. That’s what happened with a group of steelhead trout transplanted from the salty seas of California to the fresh waters of Lake Michigan for game fishermen in the 1890s. A…

Thirteen thousand years ago, as the last ice age ended, entire stretches of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef perished. Rising sea levels blanketed the world’s largest collection of corals with sediment coming off the newly inundated land, blocking the sunlight corals need to grow. The reef eventually recovered, but it took hundreds to thousands of years.…