A series of rapid-fire solar flares is providing the first chance to test a new theory of why the sun releases its biggest outbursts when its activity is ramping down. Migrating bands of magnetism that meet at the sun’s equator may cause the biggest flares, even as the sun is going to sleep. A single […]

Craft brewers are going wild. Some of the trendiest beers on the market are intentionally brewed with yeast scavenged from nature, rather than the carefully cultivated ale or lager yeast used in most commercial beers. Matthew Bochman is in on the action. By day, he’s a biochemist at Indiana University Bloomington who studies how cells […]

The gravitational wave paparazzi have tracked down the cosmic neighborhood of two merging black holes. Scientists pinpointed the region in the sky where the two black holes violently melded and kicked up swirls of the spacetime ripples, locating their stomping grounds more precisely than ever before. Researchers from LIGO — the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave […]

Here are some of the things Kay Tye relishes: break dancing, rock-climbing, snowboarding, poker, raising her young daughter and son. These adrenaline-fueled activities all require basic skills. But true mastery — and the joy Tye finds in them — comes from improvisation. She boldly steps into a void, a realm where she has to riff, […]

The deep waters of the East Pacific hold an unprepossessing treasure trove: potato-sized lumps of rock that contain valuable metals such as manganese, cobalt and copper. Turns out, such “manganese nodules” are home to another kind of goody: a species of sponge never before seen, researchers report online September 24 in Systematics and Biodiversity. These […]

A series of volcanic eruptions may have helped bring about the downfall of the last Egyptian dynasty 2,000 years ago. By suppressing the monsoons that swelled the Nile River each summer, triggering flooding that supported the region’s agriculture, the eruptions probably helped usher in an era of periodic revolts, researchers report online October 17 in […]

The spiny mouse is an unassuming rodent, but it’s armed with a very special tail. CT scans show the tail is sheathed in a secret blanket of bony plates. Before the scans, only one other group of modern mammals was known to wield this kind of armor: armadillos. The discovery, reported May 24 in iScience, […]

It’s hard to know how busy this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be, thanks to a rarely observed combination of ocean and climate conditions. The Atlantic Ocean is in an active storm era, a yearslong period of increasing storm activity. Plus sea surface temperatures there are much higher than usual this year, which can fuel […]

Less than a year after the World Health Organization declared Zika is no longer a public health emergency, the virus seems to have fallen from public consciousness, at least outside of heavily affected areas. The mosquito-borne virus staged a massive assault on the Western Hemisphere in 2015 and 2016 (SN: 12/24/16, p. 19), but this […]

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Nearly half of U.S. adults now have high blood pressure, thanks to a new definition of what constitutes high: 130/80 is the new 140/90. That means that 103 million people — up from 72 million under the old definition — need to make diet and exercise changes and, in some cases, take […]