There’s a flashy new find in the hunt for dark matter—the stuff that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe, but we have no clue what it is. A mile under Lead, South Dakota, is a giant cauldron…
Between E. coli in blueberries, glass in popsicles, and that dreaded cyclospora, this summer was all about keeping a wary eye on the groceries in the fridge. But how does the recall data stack up…
On social media, the vagus nerve often gets billed as the gateway to nervous system nirvana: It’s your ticket to better rest, relaxation, and health if you “stimulate” it correctly. Where did this…
Much of the code that describes the inner workings of social networks, helps apps predict your musical interests, and underlies innovations in AI traces back to advances in mathematical theory and…
When you see a mushroom popping up from the forest floor, that mushroom is just the tip of the fungal iceberg for a vast world beneath the surface. But the nature of fungal life makes it hard to…
There’s been wave after wave of bad news about the ocean: warming temperatures, overfishing, acidification, coral bleaching. But in the last few years, there have also been some big wins for the big…
When humans finally land on Mars, what should they do? A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out the science objectives for a crewed Mars mission. In…
AI is popping up in many corners of society, but how are doctors using it in their practice? We asked our physician listeners to call in, and many of you did. What we heard mirrored broad trends:…
We’ve been hearing for years that climate change makes weather more extreme, and extreme weather more frequent. But what’s been more difficult to measure is exactly how climate change influences a…
GPS is such an essential part of our lives that it’s easy to forget there was once a world without it. But, like many tech advancements of the 20th century, GPS was originally created by the U.S.…
A controversial pipeline project in Michigan has been stuck in legal limbo for years. But this month, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with environmentalists and leaned on an ancient legal framework:…
When the James Webb Space Telescope started sending back images in 2022, something mysterious appeared: little red dots, speckled across the sky. They didn’t look like any known celestial objects,…
Imagine you wanted to get a general idea of what people are eating in a given community. You could look at grocery store sales, or do surveys, but neither can capture a complete picture. Microbiome…