25,669 Northern Gannets in Canada.134 harbor and gray seals along the coast of Maine.21 California Condors in the western U.S. These are just a tiny fraction of the wild victims of a strain of high pathogenicity avian influenza—what we colloquially call bird flu. The virus, which scientists call H5N1, has spread like wildfire around the…
To fly or not to fly? That is the question environmentally conscious people are increasingly grappling with. Sometimes taking the plane seems the only viable option, perhaps when time is tight or when a loved one lives far away. I think we can have some flying as part of a sustainable future – but only…
H5N1 avian influenza has long been a concerning virus. Since its discovery in 1996 in waterfowl, bird flu has occasionally caused isolated human cases that have quite often been fatal. But last year H5N1 did something strange: it started infecting cattle. The absolute oddity of this leap may have been somewhat lost in the flood…
The babies were conceived via IVF ZEPHYR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Eight young children appear to have been protected from serious genetic conditions after being born using DNA from three people. The procedure involved replacing defective mitochondria from their mothers with those from a female donor. Around 1 in 5000 people have defective mitochondria, which ordinarily provide…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today we’re leaving the podcast studio to take you on a field trip to the LIGO Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We’re going to chat with Matthew Evans, MIT’s MathWorks professor of physics, all about the hunt for gravitational waves. You’ll notice that…
An illustration of a Neanderthal group preparing food LUIS MONTANYA/MARTA MONTANYA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Neanderthals may have had traditional ways of preparing food that were particular to each group. Discoveries from two caves in what is now northern Israel suggest that the residents there butchered the same kinds of prey in their own distinctive ways. Modern…
Mysterious Antimatter Physics Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider The LHCb experiment has observed a new difference between matter and antimatter in particles called baryons By Clara Moskowitz edited by Lee Billings Baryon particle illustration. Thomas Parsons/Science Source Matter and antimatter are like mirror opposites: they are the same in every respect except for their…
Two of five snow leopard cubs recently photographed in Mongolia SLCF-Mongolia/Snow Leopard Trust A pair of researchers have visited two snow leopard dens in Mongolia’s Tost mountains, where they studied and photographed five cubs, offering a rare opportunity to gather data on this threatened species. Prior to this expedition, which took place in June and…
Citations S.K. Narang et al. Abusive head trauma in infants and children: Technical report. Pediatrics. Published online February 24, 2025. doi: 10.1542/peds.2024-070457. J.M. Leventhal, AG. Asnes and G.J. Otterman. How antiscience creates confusion about the diagnosis of abusive head trauma. JAMA Pediatrics. Vol. 177, December 2023, p. 1257. doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.4516. K.W. Feldman et al. Abusive…
Peering through a cosmic keyhole at distant baby star, astronomers may have opened a new window on the deep past of our own solar system. Using combined observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, an international research team has glimpsed the earliest moments of planetary…
