For a microscopic organism, Yersinia pestis has made an outsize mark on human history. It has felled some 200 million human beings since it first evolved, in addition to provoking political, economic, social, and cultural upheavals. This toll of death ...
In his speech to America’s schoolchildren last month, President Obama had a clear directive about video games: Put them away. It wasn’t the first time he had sounded this particular alarm, warning of the dangers of days spent at gaming consoles. But ...
The surface of the brain is a complex landscape, featuring endless peaks and valleys. This intricately folded outer layer, known as the cerebral cortex, is one of the brain’s most noticeable features. But it’s also one of the least well ...
Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he ...
If the prizes sound more than a little similar to some other famous scientific honors, it’s no coincidence. “The Nobel Prize is doing an excellent job,” says Kavli. But he intends his awards to be different. While the Nobel Prizes are retrospective, ...
, which, as it's hard not to know by now, comes to the big screen this weekend, rarely ventured beyond the island of Manhattan in its six years on television. When the women did find themselves elsewhere, they weren't usually happy about it. This was ...
To evaluate the popular strategy, Kristen Jule of the University of Exeter in England analyzed efforts to reintroduce more than 2,000 captive animals belonging to 17 different carnivore species. Her analysis, spanning 45 separate research projects, ...
An icy landscape studded with frozen lakes, the wintry terrain of southern Finland appears to be the birthplace of ice skating. To trace the sport’s origins, researchers studied remnants of bone-and-leather skates found throughout northern Europe and ...
It was one of the biggest advances in cancer treatment this year, a drug combination that potentially adds years to the lives of patients whose colon cancer has spread. But the research that led to the finding could never have been conducted in the ...
It takes more than $800 million and 10 years to develop a new drug. Researchers perform study after study, testing a potential new medicine in cell cultures, animals, and humans. They determine whether it treats the right problem safely; should be ...
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