Science

As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000—an unusually large number—and they were all 10 years old. “It was just too perfect,” says West, a Ph.D. […]

Ask a man of the Shuar tribe in Ecuador’s Amazon what disgusts him the most, and he might say eating raw meat; stepping in human feces; or drinking chicha, a traditional alcohol, made “with the spit of a toothless woman,” says Lawrence Sugiyama, an anthropologist at the University of Oregon.

For planetary scientists, it was the boldest claim in a generation: an unseen extra planet, as much as 10 times the mass of Earth, lurking on the Solar System’s frontier, beyond Neptune. But the claim looks increasingly shaky, after a team of astronomers reported last week that the orbits of […]

Wildlife trafficking is having a profound negative impact on biodiversity, a new analysis finds. Hunting and trapping to feed international and national trade networks threaten numerous species, the researchers report, even those living in protected areas.

Science‘s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Seeking to spread the word about a hot new study, some scientists take to Twitter to share a link. But Twitter links rarely attract eyeballs to papers, a recent study finds.

For decades, nuclear physicists have blasted record-breaking superheavy elements into existence, extending the periodic table step by step beyond uranium, the heaviest natural element. Such heavyweights tend to be unstable, but theory predicts “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons that confer extra stability, and finding a long-lived superheavy has long […]

It is the wood that the rock greats have sworn by—swamp ash, in the form of their Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars—for over 70 years. If you’ve ever listened to rock, you’ve probably heard a swamp ash, solid body guitar. But now, climate change is threatening the wood that helped […]