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 […]
An adult insect wing is basically dead. So what in the world were tiny respiratory channels doing in a wing membrane of a morpho dragonfly? Rhainer Guillermo Ferreira was so jolted by a scanning electron microscope image showing what looked like skinny, branching tracheal tubes in a morpho wing that he called in another entomologist […]
An itty-bitty star, with a radius about the size of Saturn’s, is one of the smallest ever found. Known as EBLM J0555-57Ab, the star is significantly smaller than the Jupiter-sized TRAPPIST-1, a peewee star famous for hosting a septet of Earth-sized planets. And it’s comparable in size to a previously reported runt, 2MASS J0523-1403. Although […]
Editor’s note: On November 17, 2022, Science retracted the study described in this article, in part because “an analysis of the raw and published data revealed serious irregularities and discrepancies,” writes H. Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science. “These issues have caused the editors at Science to lose all confidence in the conclusions […]
Like the surface of an alien planet, thin sheets of copper display a complex topography of ridges and valleys. These never-before-seen undulations may spell trouble for electronic gadgets: The zigzagging surface could contribute to the electrical resistance of miniature copper wires that snake throughout computer chips. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, scientists observed nanoscale peaks […]
The sky will go dark. The temperature will drop. Stars will shine in the middle of the day. For the first time in nearly a century, millions of Americans from coast-to-coast will witness a total solar eclipse. Those who have watched the sun suddenly snuff out say it’s an otherworldly feeling. It can be humbling. […]
CASPER MOUNTAIN, Wyo. — It’s nothing like a sunset. It’s cold and dark, but it’s not like nighttime, or even twilight. The moon just snaps into place over the last slivers of the sun, turning the sun into a dark hole. The only illumination — a flat, ghostly, metallic sort of light — is from […]
Dumb extinction jokes aside, dodos’ life history is largely unknown. Now the first closeup look inside the long-gone birds’ bones is giving a glimpse into their lives, an international research team reports August 24 in Scientific Reports. Until now, almost nothing has been known about the basic biology of dodos, such as when they mated […]
A newfangled data storage device, which takes up less than a millionth the amount of space of its predecessors, could be a key component of futuristic communication systems. Scientists fashioned a tiny crystal that stores snippets of quantum information — which unlike computer data “bits” that come only in 0s and 1s, can also exist […]
In the Twitterverse, science can stir up some vigorous debates. And they’re not all about the standard issues of climate change, vaccines and evolution. Some dueling tweets involve the scientific enterprise itself. For instance, one recent tweet proclaimed “Science isn’t ‘self-correcting.’ Science is broken,” linking to a commentary about the well-documented problem that many scientific […]