Science

This summer’s total solar eclipse revealed rare views of the sun’s corona, its outermost layers of plasma millions of degrees in temperature. But the solar corona has long baffled scientists: Why is it so searingly hot compared with the sun’s visible surface, which is about 1000 times cooler?

They are about as far apart as two things in science can be: a type of ocean wave that helps drive the El Niño climate cycle, and quantum materials that, thanks to a particularly strange bit of physics, have insulating interiors and conduct current along their surface. Yet, in a remarkable case of lateral thinking,…

Studying the human mind is tough. You can ask people how they think, but they often don’t know. You can scan their brains, but the tools are blunt. You can damage their brains and watch what happens, but they don’t take kindly to that. So even a task as supposedly simple as the first step…

About 300,000 years ago, herds of rhino-sized creatures migrated across the floodplains of east-central Australia, mimicking the treks that zebras and antelopes make across Africa’s Serengeti today. But these migrants weren’t majestic, long-limbed grazers. Instead they were car-sized relatives of today’s short and stocky wombat. Evoked by a new analysis of a fossil tooth of…

How does ApoE4 do its dirty work? Since 1993, when this variant of the apolipoprotein E gene was found to multiply the risk of the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease as much as fourfold, researchers have probed its connections to β-amyloid, the dominant suspect for the cause of the illness. This protein fragment forms…

The trillions of bacteria that live in our intestines, known collectively as the gut microbiome, have been linked to maladies from eye disease to rheumatoid arthritis. Now, two new studies have added another disease: multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disorder that strips away nerve cells’ protective covers, leading to muscle weakness, blindness, and even death.…

Early next year, NASA will launch its $70 million Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) to the International Space Station (ISS).

After probing and peering at the genitalia of nearly 500 crocodiles in Palo Verde, Murray and his colleagues found something odd: The sex ratio was way out of whack, with males outnumbering females four to one among hatchling crocs. What’s more, the animals’ tissues were tainted with a synthetic steroid, which the researchers suspect was…

If these sweltering summer days prompt you to reach for a cold drink, you can thank your hypothalamus, a region of the brain that helps us regulate body temperature and other internal conditions. But the region may fail us when we get older. A new study in mice suggests that the hypothalamus promotes aging, hastening…