Science
As the Planet Warms, Trump's EPA Pick Hedges
Scott Pruitt’s confirmation hearing to lead the EPA was dissonant with the week’s biggest scientific news.
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NASA Would You Give Up Perfect Vision for a Trip to Space?
A new study put cancer patients on parabolic flight to see how microgravity worsens astronauts’ eyesight.
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Pascal Rossignol / Reuters The FDA Wants to Regulate Gene-Editing That Makes Cows Less Horny
What happens when new technology meets old laws
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Yuriko Nakao / Reuters Decoding the Origami That Drives All Life
“Proteins are built to a precision that would make human engineers blush—every atom is always in exactly the right position.”
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Ian Webster / Courtesy of Sarah Bergmann Tiny Pollinators Need Wildlife Corridors Too
Bison aren’t the only animals that roam.
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Gene Blythe / AP Do Regulations Really Kill Jobs?
Republicans love to blame the Environmental Protection Agency for some of the country’s economic woes. Is that a fair assertion?
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NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center / SDO Why Is NASA Neglecting Venus?
The agency’s “follow the water” strategy risks creating a lost generation of scientists.
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Michael Duff / AP A Global Plan to Defend Against the Future's Deadliest Diseases
$460 million will go toward developing vaccines that prevent outbreaks like Ebola from taking the world by surprise.
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Adam Gault / Getty How Reliable Are Cancer Studies?
A project that tried to reproduce the results of 50 landmark papers turned into an arduous slog—and that’s a problem in itself.
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Paul S. Wolf / Shutterstock Cottonmouths Attack When They're Stressed Out in Life
It’s not bumping into them that makes the snakes angry.
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Nick Oxford / Reuters Could Scott Pruitt Have Fixed Oklahoma's Earthquake Epidemic?
Critics say he could have done much more to help the state’s citizens.
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Larry Crowe / AP The French Aristocrat Who Invented the Restaurant
Originally a “restaurant” referred to a type of soup.
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NASA Remembering Gene Cernan
“Too many years have passed for me to still be the last man to have walked on the moon.”
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Denis Farrell / AP Tragedy Would Unfold If Trump Cancels Bush’s AIDS Program
A questionnaire from the president-elect’s transition team asked whether the extraordinarily successful PEPFAR had become a “massive, international entitlement program,” and whether it was worth the investment.
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Beth J. Harpaz / AP Flesh-Eating Worms Reach Florida's Mainland
A massive eradication effort wiped out screwworms in the U.S. 35 years ago—but then they reappeared.
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Joe Skipper / Reuters SpaceX Sticks the Landing in Triumphant Return
After a four-month launch hiatus, the company’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully sent a communications satellite into orbit and returned its first stage to a floating robotic barge.
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NASA / JPL-CALTECH Why Mars Is the Best Planet
It’s like The Man in the High Castle for Earth’s history.
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Caitlin Cunningham / Quanta Can Babies Understand the World From Birth?
There are surprising similarities between their brains and adults’.
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U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Bacteria Send Electrical Pulses as Recruitment Ads
To coordinate their behavior, the microorganisms can transmit signals much like neurons.
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Reuters Why Killer Whales (and Humans) Go Through Menopause
They’re the only animals, besides short-finned pilot whales, that do so.
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Pierre Albouy / Reuters What Happens If You Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator?
It’s a great physics thought experiment—and an awful accident in 1978.
