Ask a computer to pick a random number and you’ll probably get a response that isn’t completely unpredictable. Because they are deterministic automatons, computers struggle to generate numbers that are truly random. But a new advance on a method known as a randomness extractor makes it easier for machines to roll the dice, generating truly […]

Four new elements now have names. In December, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry officially recognized the discovery of elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, filling out the seventh row of the periodic table (SN: 2/6/16, p. 7). As is traditional in chemistry, the naming rights went to the discoverers: Scientists at RIKEN […]

Urban living could pose risks to great tits, at least in terms of their DNA. City life comes with a host of factors that can, for better or worse, affect a bird over its life span. To see how urbanization might influence early development in great tits (Parus major), biologists at Lund University in Sweden […]

BOSTON — A deadly infection that has now spread to three states is puzzling disease investigators. The illness is caused by Elizabethkingia anophelis, a bacterium commonly found in soil and water and that, until now, has rarely caused problems. Public health authorities in Wisconsin first reported the outbreak to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control […]

Particle physics fans are just going to have to wait. Rumors swirling on the internet are casting doubt on hints of a new particle reported by scientists at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva. But researchers say it’s still too soon to know whether the particle exists or not. “Currently the data are still […]