Science

After years of studying maps, Mormon scripture, and Spanish chronicles, Ferguson had concluded that the Book of Mormon took place around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico. He had come to the jungles of Campeche, northeast of the isthmus, to find proof.

The most famous prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, is often described as the Nobel Prize for math. Now, confidential correspondence from the 1950s provides a first window into the deliberations of early Fields Medal committees. The letters suggest the award was never intended to honor the most important discoveries in the field, but was…

For more than a decade, Colin Dundas, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, has had a daily routine: inspecting a dozen or so high-resolution images beamed back every day from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). A few years ago, something surprising popped out from the planet’s sea of rust: a pale…

For the first time, scientists have produced evidence in living humans that the protein tau, which mars the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, spreads from neuron to neuron. Although such movement wasn’t directly observed, the finding may illuminate how neurodegeneration occurs in the devastating illness, and it could provide new ideas for stemming the brain damage…

When you’re sick, it’s written all over your face.

In 1992, researchers discovered evidence of what was then potentially the earliest life on Earth: 3.5-billion-year-old microscopic squiggles encased in Australian rocks. Since then, however, scientists have debated whether these imprints truly represent ancient microorganisms, and even if they do, whether they’re really that old. Now, a comprehensive analysis of these microfossils suggests that these…

For archaeologists, Afghanistan is virtually off-limits for fieldwork, as Taliban forces battle the Kabul government in far-flung provinces and security remains tenuous even in the capital. Yet U.S. and Afghan researchers are now finding thousands of never-before-cataloged ancient sites in the country, which for more than a millennium served as a crucial crossroads linking East…

A new study suggests that newborns associate the concept of “few” with “left” and “many” with “right,” supporting the idea that such bias might be innate.

All life forms on Earth use the same genetic alphabet of the bases A, T, C, and G—nitrogen-containing compounds that constitute the building blocks of DNA and spell out the instructions for making proteins. Now, scientists have developed the first bacterium to use extra letters, or unnatural bases, to build proteins.