Science

On Saturday, Lauren Pope—a biology Ph.D. student at Stanford University—received an email detailing a “graduate student compact” she’ll be required to sign before she can register for the fall semester. The document lays out expectations for how students will behave on campus given fears of COVID-19 transmission, as well as […]

Australia’s biggest bats—known as flying foxes—are among the world’s most restless nomads, according to a new study. Just how restless? The most peripatetic can journey up to 6000 kilometers per year, much farther than any land mammal and close to the distances covered by some whales and migrating birds.

Take that, asteroid 2020 QG!

Practical and glamorous, aluminium is prized for making products from kitchen foil and beverage cans to Tesla Roadsters and aircraft. But the silvery metal—abundant, cheap, lightweight, and corrosion resistant—has a dark side: red mud. This brownish red slurry, a caustic mishmash of metal- and silicon-rich oxides, often with a dash […]

Earth’s ice ages are typically thought of as seemingly unending periods of bitter cold. But a new study suggests bursts of carbon dioxide (CO2) often entered the atmosphere during these times, providing decades or even centuries of relative warmth amid 10,000-year stretches of chill. Such pulses may have caused glaciers […]

A Triassic sea monster v. sea monster event.

The researchers say that mainly screening symptomatic patients has led to “the erroneous conclusion that the vast majority of people infected are adults”.

For Lars Peter Nielsen, it all began with the mysterious disappearance of hydrogen sulfide. The microbiologist had collected black, stinky mud from the bottom of Aarhus Harbor in Denmark, dropped it into big glass beakers, and inserted custom microsensors that detected changes in the mud’s chemistry. At the start of […]