Tampa Breaks 100 Degrees F for First Time on Record as Heat Wave Bakes Eastern U.S. Records are starting to fall to the continuing heat dome that is covering much of the eastern U.S. By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson HeatRisk forecast for July 29, 2025. The NWS HeatRisk is an experimental color-numeric-based index…
Regular exercise could help keep us sharp YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP via Getty Images A structured course of exercise, diet, cognitive challenges and social engagement seems to be particularly effective at warding off cognitive decline, compared with more relaxed self-guided efforts. The brain’s capacity to remember, use language and solve problems tends to decline with age, often…
Our brains might prime our immune system merely by seeing someone who looks sick. A study published July 28 in Nature Neuroscience found that participants who saw sick-looking faces in virtual reality showed changes in brain activity related to personal space monitoring and threat detection. Additionally, the activity of certain immune cells in the blood…
The Myth of the Designer Baby—Why ‘Genetic Optimization’ Is More Hype Than Science A genomics firm saying they can help parents with “genetic optimization” of their embryos is tone-deaf Silicon Valley marketing trampling over legitimate science. Parents should be wary By Arthur Caplan & James Tabery An understandable ethics outcry greeted the June announcement of…
The bubble of gas around the red supergiant DFK 52 ALMA/Mark Siebert et al. 2025 A dying star is expelling a vast sphere of dust and gas around it that is about half as wide as our solar system. Astronomers are at a loss to explain it, as there is no known mechanism that could…
Grabbing a meal with a friend is way better than dining solo — and killer whales agree. The whales prefer to hunt for herring in pairs, researchers report July 3 in Current Biology. These cetaceans divide hunting tasks in a coordinated and cooperative manner, often with a long-term partner. This highly social feeding behavior highlights…
You Don’t Remember Being a Baby, but Your Brain Was Making Memories Brain scans capture memory formation in babies, raising new questions about why people forget their earliest years By Nick Turk-Browne edited by Daisy Yuhas A plume of red, a searing pain and the sounds of summer—these are fragments of my earliest memory, when…
At the centre of the Milky Way, stars look younger than they should NASA, Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC, Caltech) Stars close to the centre of our galaxy may be nearly immortal because they gobble up dark matter for energy. More than two decades ago, astronomers noticed something odd about the stars near the centre of…
Goalkeepers struggle to guess which way a penalty taker will shoot JAVIER SORIANO/AFP via Getty Images Deep learning models trained on more than 1000 penalty kicks in football matches can predict which way the ball will go better than real-life goalkeepers. “Penalty kicks are some of the most decisive moments in soccer, often determining the…
Researcher used a laser to superheat a sample of gold and measured its temperature with a pulse of ultra-bright X-rays Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Wafer-thin sheets of gold shot briefly with lasers can be heated up to 14 times their melting point while remaining solid, far beyond the theoretical limit, raising the possibility that…
