Science

The objects and people children play with as early as toddlerhood may provide clues to their eventual sexual orientation, reveals the largest study of its kind. The investigation, which tracked more than 4500 kids over the first 15 years of their lives, seeks to answer one of the most controversial questions in the social sciences,…

By making assumptions about how the push and pull of energy and matter in the universe have changed the rate of cosmic expansion since the microwave background was formed, the astrophysicists can take their map and adjust the Hubble constant to the present-day, local universe. The numbers should match. But they don’t.

Using images from NASA’s orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has deduced in unprecedented detail the distributions of dark matter within three clusters of galaxies.

A few years ago, Christopher Hamm was reading up on monarch butterflies when he noticed something peculiar. All of the scientific articles that mentioned the number of the insect’s chromosomes—30, it seemed—referenced a 2004 paper, which in turn cited a 1975 paper. But when Hamm, then a postdoc at the University of Kansas in Lawrence,…

In a new study, two quantum computers fashioned from dramatically different technologies have competed head-to-head in an algorithm-crunching exercise. One computer was more reliable, and the other was faster. But what’s most important, some scientists say, is that for the first time, two different quantum computers have been compared and tested on the same playing…

Predicting color is easy: Shine a light with a wavelength of 510 nanometers, and most people will say it looks green. Yet figuring out exactly how a particular molecule will smell is much tougher. Now, 22 teams of computer scientists have unveiled a set of algorithms able to predict the odor of different molecules based…

Fasting is all the rage. Self-help books promise it will incinerate excess fat, spruce up your DNA, and prolong your life. A new scientific study has backed up some health claims about eating less. The clinical trial reveals that cutting back on food for just 5 days a month could help prevent or treat age-related…

A ruthless killer may soon help brain cancer patients. The rabies virus, which kills tens of thousands of people a year, has a rare ability to enter nerve cells and use them as a conduit to infect brain tissue. Now, scientists are trying to mimic this strategy to ferry tumor-killing nanoparticles into brain tumors. So…

Some of the health risks of inhaling fine and ultrafine particles are well-established, such as asthma, lung cancer, and, most recently, heart disease. But a growing body of evidence suggests that exposure can also harm the brain, accelerating cognitive aging, and may even increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.