As a young doctoral researcher at a university in the southern U.S., Camilo felt like he was finally closing in on his dream of becoming a leader in the next generation of HIV scholars. His recent work has helped hundreds of LGBTQ+ Latino people access HIV prevention programs and preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a medication…
How can maths help you win the lottery? Brandon Bell/Getty Images I have a completely foolproof, 100-per-cent-guaranteed method for winning any lottery you like. If you follow my very simple method, you will absolutely win the maximum jackpot possible. There is just one teeny, tiny catch – you’re going to need to already be a…
It may be worth making your nighttime environment as dark as possible Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock The more light you are exposed to at night, the higher your risk of heart disease, according to the largest study yet on how night light affects heart health. Multiple environmental and behavioural cues synchronise our body’s circadian rhythms – internal…
Neanderthal culinary skills were more sophisticated than we thought GREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Neanderthals were processing animal bones to extract fat from them 125,000 years ago, nearly 100,000 years before modern humans were known to do anything similar. The evidence comes from an extraordinary lakeside site at Neumark-Nord in eastern Germany, where over 100,000 fragments…
Vanilla plants could have a future that’s not so sweet. Wild relatives of the vanilla plant — which could be essential if the original cash crop disappears — may someday live in different places than their usual pollinators, according to two climate change predictions. The result could be a major mismatch, with habitat overlap between…
Emojis affect how conversations are perceived IMAGO/Wolfgang Maria Weber/Alamy People who use emojis in messages with friends are seen as more attentive and responsive – regardless of which emojis they send. Across the world, emojis are used over 10 billion times a day to inject emotional nuance into digital conversations. But their actual influence on…
The future of plant life on Mars may be bioplastic. Green algae (Dunaliella tertiolecta) flourished under Mars-like conditions inside translucent, bioplastic habitats, researchers report July 2 in Science Advances. Algae or plants that produce bioplastics grown inside the habitats could provide more material to build livable structures. Such a self-sustaining loop could help space travelers…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. This Fourth of July some of the celebrants flocking to their local parks and waterfronts won’t be taking in the iconic sights and sounds of a fireworks display. In some cases, those traditional explosives could be replaced with swarms of colorful drones. Drone light shows…
A bioplastic container inside a chamber simulating Mars’s environment Wordsworth et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadp4985 Future plastic habitats on Mars could be created from locally grown algae that could then host more algae-growing operations. The first step of such a circular system has been shown to work in Mars-like conditions in a lab, which…
Vaccines are facing new challenges from an unexpected quarter: the people who set vaccine policy for the United States. Many people have never heard of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, but its work keeps preventable diseases, from polio to measles to COVID-19, in check. The committee decides which population groups should get certain vaccines….
