Matter
The Surprising Power of an Electric Eel’s Shock
By CARL ZIMMER
New research has uncovered the remarkable sophistication with which electric eels deploy their shocks.
The spacecraft returned to Earth, just a mile off target in the Pacific Ocean, about four and a half hours after it was launched from Florida.
New research has uncovered the remarkable sophistication with which electric eels deploy their shocks.
A mammoth effort is underway to digitally publish Albert Einstein’s letters, papers, postcards and diaries that have been scattered in archives, attics and shoeboxes.
The new government is moving with remarkable speed to clear away regulatory burdens for industry, the armed forces, mining and power projects.
The flu vaccine is a relatively poor match to a new virus that is currently circulating, health officials said.
Officials, using data from birth certificates, said there were 3.93 million births in 2013, down slightly from 3.95 million in 2012.
Newly obtained photographs show the handling and sampling of the binary sarin shell taken from an improvised explosive device used against American forces in Baghdad in 2004.
In issuing the crowd-control order, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf argued that large concentrations of people at election rallies were precisely the situations that could spawn new infections.
For Dr. James D. Watson, a co-winner of the prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, the sale became part of an effort to redeem himself for making offensive remarks about black people.
Researchers say a significant share of the bacteria in India — in its water, sewage, animals, soil and even its mothers — are resistant to nearly all antibiotics.
A new generation of wearable devices for sleeping infants can gather lots of data, but parents might struggle to figure out what to do with it all.
The university in Austin said most of the missing 100 brains, collected decades ago for research, had been disposed of as biological waste.
A multistate analysis concluded that the traditional approach — killing some wolves to reduce their impact on livestock — mostly does not work.
An old building in a shabby part of Cambridge, Mass., formerly a Budweiser distribution center, is now the world’s most powerful factory for analyzing genes from people and viruses.
A new exhibit featuring dozens of glowing, motorized, interactive robots will teach people what it feels like to be Godzilla, and hopefully a little math, too.
A new study has found that millions of tiny insects are potentially consuming the equivalent of 60,000 frankfurters a year on a stretch of 150 blocks of median strips in Manhattan.
Genealogy can reveal secrets about all of us, at once: the emergence of our species, the political history of the world, and the origins of the social structures that dictate modern life.
Avi Loeb has published more than 400 papers on the nature of early stars, galaxies, planets and black holes.
Scientists from around the world will compete to best answer the question “What is sleep?” in terms that a sixth grader could appreciate.
Scientists are dusting off old insect collections in museums in an effort to learn what has happened to bee populations.
As the nation lags in meeting its goals and businesses complain about global competition, Chancellor Angela Merkel promised to redouble efforts to reach her goal by 2020.
Researchers used highly sophisticated sensors to map Old Sarum, an 11th-century town near Stonehenge.
At the Broad Institute in Cambridge, researchers are sequencing the genomes of viruses like Lassa and Ebola to watch them mutate in real time.
A robot exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Math shows how simple interactions lead to large-scale, organized behavior.
Early editions of the Access to Medicine Index focused on infectious and tropical diseases, but the list has been refined to include access to drugs to mental illnesses.
Snowflakes can appear perfectly symmetrical, raising the question of whether each of its arms knows how the others are growing.
Their guts contain only 76 micro-organisms, yet they are not harmed when ingesting wastes from a carcass.
A new study in the journal PLOS One indicates that it was locals, not immigrants, whose corpses were feared.
Gray seals are a major predator of harbor porpoises, according to DNA analysis of porpoise bite wounds.
From subways to sky-high offices, people scurry to and fro in Manhattan, creating something like a giant ant mound — precisely what you will find if you zoom in on its sparse patches of soil.
Just because you think you recall something doesn’t mean you do.
A mine fire in May killed 301 men, making it the worst industrial disaster in Turkish history. This is the story of two men who lived through it.
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