Neutrinos are everywhere—trillions of the virtually massless particles pass through your body every second—but they’re notoriously hard to pin down, especially the rare high-energy ones from deep space. Only about a dozen of these cosmic neutrinos are detected annually, and scientists had connected only one to its source. Now, IceCube, […]
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Brain cell clusters, grown in lab for more than a year, mirror changes in a newborn’s brain
Put human stem cells in a lab dish with the right nutrients, and they’ll do their best to form a little brain. They’ll fail, but you’ll get an organoid: a semiorganized clump of cells. Organoids have become a powerful tool for studying brain development and disease, but researchers assumed these microscopic […]
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Humble dung beetles may be ideal DNA detectors for animal surveys
Biologists wanting to identify the resident creatures of a location, be it nearby woods or a distant mountainside, could soon have new assistants to help them vacuum up a surrounding’s DNA: dung beetles. The guts of these unfussy eaters contain species-identifying mammalian DNA, a study has found, and could provide […]
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Road map to U.S. fusion power plant comes into clearer focus—sort of
Plans to build a prototype fusion power plant in the United States have come into tighter focus, as a new report lays out a rough timeline for building the multibillon-dollar plant and a strategy for developing its design. The United States should strive to start construction of the pilot by […]
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Ancient kauri trees capture last collapse of Earth’s magnetic field
Several years ago, workers breaking ground for a power plant in New Zealand unearthed a record of a lost time: a 60-ton trunk from a kauri tree, the largest tree species in New Zealand. The tree, which grew 42,000 years ago, was preserved in a bog and its rings spanned […]
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‘Touchdown confirmed!’ Perseverance landing marks new dawn for Mars science
It’s a new day on Mars. NASA’s $2.7 billion Perseverance rover has successfully landed in Jezero crater, alighting just 35 meters away from hazardous boulders it had identified during descent. At about 3:55 p.m. EST, confirmation came back of the rover safely touching its wheels down, resulting in exuberant but […]
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Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’
In the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio enters into other people’s dreams to interact with them and steal secrets from their subconscious. Now, it seems this science fiction plot is one baby step closer to reality. For the first time, researchers have had “conversations” involving novel questions and math problems with […]
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Vaccine-wary France turns to citizens’ panel to boost trust in COVID-19 shots
Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.