In full swingThe swaying feeling in jazz music that compels feet to tap may arise from near-imperceptible delays in musicians’ timing, Nikk Ogasa reported in “Jazz gets its swing from small, subtle delays” (SN: 11/19/22, p. 5). Reader Oda Lisa, a self-described intermediate saxophonist, has noticed these subtle delays while playing.“I recorded my ‘jazzy’ version […]

Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez saw the future of energy on a broiling-hot day last September. An email alert hit her inbox from the San Diego Gas & Electric Company. “Extreme heat straining the grid,” read the message, which was also pinged as a text to 27 million people. “Save energy to help avoid power interruptions.” It worked. […]

As far back as roughly 25,000 years ago, Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have jotted down markings to communicate information about the behavior of their prey, a new study finds. These markings include dots, lines and the symbol “Y,” and often accompany images of animals. Over the last 150 years, the mysterious depictions, some dating back […]

Prairie voles have long been heralded as models of monogamy. Now, a study suggests that the “love hormone” once thought essential for their bonding — oxytocin — might not be so necessary after all. Interest in the romantic lives of prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) was first sparked more than 40 years ago, says Devanand Manoli, […]

Penicillin, effective against many bacterial infections, is often a first-line antibiotic. Yet it is also one of the most common causes of drug allergies. Around 10 percent of people say they’ve had an allergic reaction to penicillin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now researchers have found a genetic link to […]

The fate of a potential new Alzheimer’s drug is still uncertain. Evidence that the drug works isn’t convincing enough for it to be approved, outside experts told the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during a Nov. 6 virtual meeting that at times became contentious. The scientists and clinicians were convened at the request of the […]

Bacteria go to extremes to handle hard times: They hunker down, building a fortress-like shell around their DNA and turning off all signs of life. And yet, when times improve, these dormant spores can rise from the seeming dead. But “you gotta be careful when you decide to come back to life,” says Peter Setlow, […]

Super strong artificial silk? That’s so metal. Giving revamped silkworm silk a metallic bath may make the strands both strong and stiff, scientists report October 6 in Matter. Some strands were up to 70 percent stronger than silk spun by spiders, the team found. The work is the latest in a decades-long quest to create […]

Humankind is seeing Neptune’s rings in a whole new light thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. In an infrared image released September 21, Neptune and its gossamer diadems of dust take on an ethereal glow against the inky backdrop of space. The stunning portrait is a huge improvement over the rings’ previous close-up, which […]

As people around the world marveled in July at the most detailed pictures of the cosmos snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope, biologists got their first glimpses of a different set of images — ones that could help revolutionize life sciences research. The images are the predicted 3-D shapes of more than 200 million […]