The prime suspect in Brazil’s recent surge in birth defects may be convicted this summer, in the sweltering cities of Colombia. That’s when the first big wave of pregnant women infected with Zika virus last fall will begin to give birth. Whether or not these babies are born with shrunken brains, a condition known as […]

The grunts, moans and wobbles of gelada monkeys, a chatty species residing in Ethiopia’s northern highlands, observe a universal mathematical principle seen until now only in human language. The new research, published online April 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on the evolution of primate communication and complex human […]

Mercury has never looked better. Volcanic plains, craters, mountains and valleys are showcased in the first complete topographic map of the innermost planet, released May 6. Stitched together from over 100,000 images taken by NASA’s now-defunct MESSENGER spacecraft, the global catalog of landscapes provide data that researchers can use to better understand the history and […]

Ocean spicinessOH-shuhn SPĪ-sē-nes n.Relative temperature and salinity variations within seawater of the same density. Warmer, saltier ocean water is considered spicy while cooler, fresher water is minty. Climate change will spice up the Arctic Ocean, researchers report in the April Journal of Physical Oceanography. Seawater that is both salty and cold is the most dense, […]

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 […]

Shrink yourself small enough to swoop over the surface of a human cell, and you might be reminded of Earth’s terrain. Fats, or lipids, stay close to the surface, like grasses and shrubs. Proteins stand above the shrubs, as mighty oaks or palm trees. But before you could distinguish the low-lying lipids from the towering […]