Science Selections

The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and his Tower. His vision of a global wireless-transmission tower proved to be his undoing.

New clues hint at how Researchers are sifting through symptoms to figure out what the virus does to the brain, by Laura Sanders

Why Did Humans Lose Their Fur? We are the naked apes of the world, having shed most of our body hair long ago. By Jason Daiey.

100 years ago few people claimed to fully understand Relativity, but it still managed to spark the publics imagination. By Dan Falk

Research shows the Y chromosome may escape extinction in the short term. But what if, in the future, we reproduce artificially?

Paleontologists seek the ancestors that could explain how bats became the only flying mammals. By Riley Black.

The Sun radiates far more gamma rays than expected, raising questions about its magnetic field and the possibility of exotic physics

Programming by Voice May Be the Next Frontier in Software Development. Your speech becomes your computer's commands.

This Physicist's Ideas of Time Will Blow Your Mind. Is time only in our head? By Ephrat Livni.

Comets Are More Dangerous Than We Thought. Could a comet, not an asteroid, have killed the dinosaurs? By Sean Raymond

Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars? Why a physicist believes our understanding of black holes is wrong. By Jesse Stone

Nigel Goldenfeld applied condensed matter physics to show evolution was blazingly fast for the earliest life and then slowed down.

Aging Is Reversible - at least in human cells and live mice. Study shows changes to gene activity that occur with age can be turned back.

Detailed images of the anti-aging enzyme telomerase are a drug designer's dream. By Richard Faragher.

Whether it actually is the most important meal of the day, the real emphasis seems to be on keeping weekday breakfast low-key.

If you want to supercharge learning and become smarter, the Feynman Technique might be the best way to learn absolutely anything.

How We'll Forget John Lennon. Our culture has two types of forgetting. By Kevin Berger.

Brain background noise may yield clues to persistent mysteries, giving insights into sleep, aging and more. By Elizabeth Landau

Theoretical physicist Andrei Linde may have the world's most expansive conception of what infinity looks like. By Alan Lightman

Scientists study how the gut microbiome can affect brain health. It may lead to better and easier brain disease treatment.

Dogs have been our best friends for at least 23,000 years. They accompanied the first people to set foot in the Americas.

Anti-nutrients - they're part of a normal diet and not as scary as they sound. By Jill Joyce.

The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior. Bertrand Russell's magnificent Nobel prize acceptance speech. By Maria Popova

How advances in bottling, fermenting and taste-testing are democratizing a once-opaque liquid. By Ben Panko

From Fortran to arXiv, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed.

Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt Over the Millennia. By Dana G. Smith.

An ultrasound and chance sightings of potential mating rituals could help save these gentle giants from extinction. By Ashifa Kassam

Forget Everything You Think You Know About Time. Is a linear representation of time accurate? By Brian Gallagher

For much of history, human beings needed to be physically active every day in order to hunt or gather. They didn't do formal exercise

3.5 billion year-old stromatolites built the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere to 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve

An astrophysicist argues signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared. What's the evidence? By Elizabeth Kolbert

Hot spots orbit just outside the black hole at the galaxy's center. Their motions give us a close look at that violent environment.

Regular ingestion of the drug alters your brain's chemical makeup, leading to fatigue, headaches and nausea if you try to quit.

Optical hardware performs massive parallel AI calculations. Two research groups do it by very different methods. By John Timmer

How an obscure British PC maker invented the Acorn Risc Machine (ARM) processor and changed the world. By Jason Torchinsky

The World Is Studded With Artificial Mountains. They're fake, but they can be spectacular (and hazardous). By Dylan Taylor-Lehman

Smart concrete could pave the way for high-tech, cost-effective roads. By Luna Lu and Vishal Saravade.

A renaissance in structural battery research aims to build energy storage into the structures of devices they power.

Electrodes threaded through blood vessels let people control gadgets with their minds. By Adam Rogers.

If recycling plastics makes no sense, remake the plastics. New catalytic approaches convert plastic into liquid fuels, nanotubes

First room-temperature superconductor. A few million atmospheres of pressure lets mundane chemicals superconduct. By John Timmer

What happens when your natural sleeping pattern is at odds with the rest of the world? By Rachel Hall.

Animals have evolved to use numbers to exploit food sources, avoid predators and reproduce. By Andreas Nieder.

The CoVid-19 pandemic has revealed that we don't need handshakes. By Steve Mirsky.

Natural selection for hypersocial traits enabled Earth's apex species to best Neandrtals and other competitors.

In a plague outbreak in the 1630's Galileo was forced to find new ways of researching and connecting with his family. By Hannah Marcus

Dogs see the world differently than people, but it's a myth that they see only black, white and shades of gray. By Nancy Dreschel

Absence of audio recording technology makes 'when' a tough question to answer. But there are theories as to 'why'. By Matt Soniak

The idea that objects influence each other because they're in physical proximity is soon to be proven wrong. By Lee Smolin.

Fatness meant various things to medieval people. Unmanly to upper class men, enviable to lower. For women it could mean fertility.

Surviving a brush with death can leave a legacy in the mind - and may show how it works under extreme conditions. By Christof Koch