Animals
Ed Yong’s ‘An Immense World’ reveals how animals perceive the world
The book showcases the diverse sensory abilities of other animals and how their view of the world is different from our own.
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Cover Story
Tardigrades could teach us how to handle the rigors of space travel
Tardigrades can withstand X-rays, freezing and vacuum. Now researchers are learning how they do it, with an eye toward human space travel.
Reviews & Previews
Science Visualized
Chemistry
A pigment’s shift in chemistry robbed a painted yellow rose of its brilliance
The degradation of an arsenic-based paint stripped shadows and light from a still life flower in a 17th century work by painter Abraham Mignon.
Notebook
Tech
Scientists grew living human skin around a robotic finger
In the hopes of one day building super realistic cyborgs, researchers built a robotic finger that wears living human skin.
Features
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Electrical bacteria may help clean oil spills and curb methane emissions
Cable bacteria are living electrical wires that may become a tool to reduce methane emissions and clean oil spills.
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Demond Mullins climbed Everest to inspire more Black outdoor enthusiasts
Mullins hopes his successful Mount Everest summit will encourage more Black people to experience the great outdoors.
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Spinal stimulation gives some people with paralysis more freedom
Methods that stimulate the spine with electrodes promise to improve the lives of people with spinal cord injuries, in ways that go well beyond walking.
More Stories from the July 16, 2022 issue
- Health & Medicine
5 misunderstandings of pregnancy biology that cloud the abortion debate
The Supreme Court’s scrapping of Roe v. Wade shifts decisions about related health care to states. Accurate science is often missing in those talks.
- Animals
Here’s why pumpkin toadlets are such clumsy jumpers
Tiny Brachycephalus frogs from southern Brazil can leap into the air but have trouble landing.
- Physics
How fast a row of dominoes topples depends on friction
Computer simulations reveal that two types of friction are important in determining how quickly dominoes collapse.
- Physics
Scientists created ‘smoke rings’ of light
A swirling doughnut of light shows that vortex rings aren’t just for fluids anymore.
- Health & Medicine
Here’s what we know right now about getting COVID-19 again
Repeat coronavirus infections may be on the rise as the omicron variant continues to spread. Scientists are still trying to nail down the risks.
- Astronomy
An otherwise quiet galaxy in the early universe is spewing star stuff
Seen as it was 700 million years after the Big Bang, the galaxy churns out a relatively paltry number of stars. And yet it’s heaving gas into space.
- Science & Society
‘Virology’ ponders society’s relationship with viruses
In a collection of wide-ranging essays, microbiologist Joseph Osmundson reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic and calls for “a new rhetoric of care.”
- Astronomy
A celestial loner might be the first known rogue black hole
The object could be the first isolated stellar-mass black hole identified in the Milky Way — or it might be an unusually heavy neutron star.
- Archaeology
Ancient bacterial DNA hints Europe’s Black Death started in Central Asia
Archaeological and genetic data pin the origins of Europe’s 1346–1353 bubonic plague to a bacterial strain found in graves in Asia from the 1330s.
- Ecosystems
Some polar bears in Greenland survive on surprisingly little sea ice
“Glacial mélange” could provide a last refuge for some bears as the Earth warms, but climate action is needed to preserve the species, researchers say.
- Microbes
This giant bacterium is the largest one found yet
On average, Thiomargarita magnifica measures 1 centimeter long and maxes out at 2 centimeters. It is 50 times larger than other giant bacteria.
- Animals
Butterflies may lose their ‘tails’ like lizards
Fragile, tail-like projections on some butterflies' wings may be a lifesaver.
- Environment
Earth’s oldest known wildfires raged 430 million years ago
430-million-year-old fossilized charcoal suggests atmospheric oxygen levels of at least 16 percent, the amount needed for fire to take hold and spread.
- Chemistry
Cats chewing on catnip boosts the plant’s insect-repelling powers
When cats tear up catnip, it increases the amount of insect-repelling chemicals released by the plants.
- Quantum Physics
Quantum physics exponentially improves some types of machine learning
It wasn’t entirely clear if quantum computers could improve machine learning in practice, but new experiments and theoretical proofs show that it can.
- Paleontology
50 years ago, the dinosaurs’ demise was still a mystery
In 1972, scientists blamed dinosaur biology for the reptiles’ demise. Years later, researchers ID’d the real killer: an apocalyptic asteroid.
