Science

The cats and dogs lie as if asleep, in individual graves. Many wore collars or other adornments, and they had been cared for through injury and old age, like today’s pets. But the last person to bury a beloved animal companion in this arid Egyptian land on the coast of […]

One hundred years ago, a play by the Czech author Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot,” telling the story of artificial factory workers designed to serve humans. Now, in a metanarrative twist, a robot itself has written a play. And it premieres online today.

Hackers published a batch of internal documents from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) on the dark web yesterday, after the agency refused to pay up in a ransomware attack. The attack, which began on 8 February, has completely knocked out the agency’s grant application and review process and […]

When Teddy Goetz—a fourth-year medical student at Columbia University—applied to residency programs in October 2020, he felt as though he had no choice but to out himself as transgender. “I had to put my birth name all over my application because of my publications, and that was really upsetting,” he […]

The first organisms to “breathe” oxygen—or at least use it—appeared 3.1 billion years ago, according to a new genetic analysis of dozens of families of microbes. The find is surprising because the Great Oxidation Event, which filled Earth’s atmosphere with the precious gas, didn’t occur until some 500 million years […]

Deep in the churning pools of a wastewater treatment plant, microbiologists have uncovered stealth alliances and intrigue that rival human guerilla warfare. The instigator is a microscopic fungus, and its target is rotifers, tiny common aquatic animals that also thrive in wastewater sludge.

Evolutionary biologist Thibaut Brunet was studying single-celled organisms called choanoflagellates when he noticed something strange: The microbes are typically rigid, but when they got trapped in a tight space, they started to move like The Blob (see video, above). In his lab at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, he […]

Plastics are a climate problem. Making precursors for common plastics, such as ethylene and carbon monoxide (CO), consumes fossil fuels and releases plenty of carbon dioxide (CO2). In recent years, chemists have devised bench-top reactors called electrochemical cells that aim to reverse the process, starting with water and waste CO2 from […]