Science

Every summer, the “land down under” does a little dance: It slowly shifts 1 millimeter to the northwest and dips down 2 to 3 millimeters on its northwestern side. When winter comes, it shuffles back by the same amount, while its southeastern coast does the downward dipping.

No chapter of Arctic history is more mysterious than the disappearance of these Norse settlements sometime in the 15th century. Theories for the colony’s failure have included everything from sinister Basque pirates to the Black Plague.

Imagine spending your whole life seeing the world in black and white, and then seeing a vase of roses in full color for the first time. That’s kind of what it was like for the scientists who have taken the first multicolor images of cells using an electron microscope.

Human hunters may be making birds smarter by inadvertently shooting those with smaller brains. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that hunting may be exerting a powerful evolutionary force on bird populations in Denmark, and likely wherever birds are hunted. But the work also raises a red flag for some researchers who…

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens and the shades of evening drew on, a sense of insufferable gloom fell on geneticist Michael O’Connor.

Run-down cells, known as senescent cells, may make us old. A new study of mice suggests that they also drive another scourge of our advancing years—atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty plaques in our arteries that can spur heart attacks and strokes. If scientists verify the findings, drugs that cull the cells could one day treat…

In January, astronomers announced evidence for Planet Nine, a new giant planet, based on the way it would shepherd six icy worlds into clustered orbits on the other side of the solar system. Three new objects add to the picture.

Not only did a separate species appear between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago, but that it was the hybrid offspring of the steppe bison—whose descendants include today’s American bison—and another extinct cowlike mammal called the aurochs.

The 9-month-old patent battle over CRISPR, a novel genome-editing tool that could have immense commercial value, has taken two surprising twists. Last week, attorneys for the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the research organizations vying for CRISPR rights, submitted motions that could let it win even if it loses. And yesterday, a new…