Science News will be on the scene at the April 22 March for Science in Washington, D.C. Follow us on Twitter (@ScienceNews) and watch the live stream below. The march may be “unprecedented,” sociologist Kelly Moore told Rachel Ehrenberg for a blog post giving a historical perspective on scientists’ activism. “This is the first time […]
Zika virus plays hard to get. Weeks after the virus disappears from the bloodstream, it still lingers in the lymph nodes and the central nervous system of rhesus monkeys, researchers report online April 27 in Cell. That could help explain why Zika infection can cause neurological problems in both infants and adults. “Zika does stick […]
Scientists have shown why fruit flies don’t get lost. Their brains contain cells that act like a compass, marking the direction of flight. It may seem like a small matter, but all animals — even Siri-dependent humans — have some kind of internal navigation system. It’s so vital to survival that it is probably linked […]
As the Cassini spacecraft plunges toward its death on Saturn, the world’s knowledge of the famous ringed planet continues to accumulate. Thanks to years of observations by the versatile probe, astronomers now know Saturn as intimately as macaroni knows cheese. But still hardly anyone outside the world of astronomy knows anything about Cassini — and […]
The wavelike properties of quantum matter could lead to a scaled-down version of Star Trek technology. A new kind of tractor beam could use a beam of particles to reel in atoms or molecules, physicists propose in the May 5 Physical Review Letters. Scientists have previously created tractor beams using light or sound waves, which […]
Nerve cells in a poorly understood part of the brain have the power to prompt voracious eating in already well-fed mice. Two to three seconds after blue light activated cells in the zona incerta, a patch of neurons just underneath the thalamus and above the hypothalamus, mice dropped everything and began shoveling food into their […]
When the eyes of her mice looked normal, Xu Wang was certain she had done something wrong. She was blasting the mice with blinding light to study how a specific gene affected the animals’ response to eye injury. All the mice were given the drug tamoxifen. Half were engineered to respond to the drug by […]
Early on, whale hearing may have been ho-hum. Unlike today’s whales that specialize in making — and hearing — very high- or low-pitched sounds, early whales’ ears probably picked up noises somewhere in the middle, paleontologists Mickaël Mourlam and Maeva Orliac report June 8 in Current Biology. Looking at CT scans of ancient whale ear […]
A method that gives mice a tan without using ultraviolet radiation now works in human skin samples. It’s an early step in developing a lotion or cream that might provide fair-skinned folk with protection against skin cancer. As reported June 13 in Cell Reports, a topical drug penetrated and tanned laboratory samples of live human […]
Long typecast as the strong silent type, bones are speaking up. In addition to providing structural support, the skeleton is a versatile conversationalist. Bones make hormones that chat with other organs and tissues, including the brain, kidneys and pancreas, experiments in mice have shown. “The bone, which was considered a dead organ, has really become […]