For millions of people with migraines, relief has been hard to find. Existing treatments don’t work for everyone, and the search for new ones has been slow. But now, diabetes and weight-loss drugs have come out of an unexpected area of medicine as a strong competitor. In a small but important trial, liraglutide, a drug ...
For hundreds of years, people have been proud that they are the only species that can do complicated maths. But what if we aren’t the only ones? More and more studies show that many animals, from tiny insects to clever crows, have a natural sense of numbers that helps them stay alive by letting them ...
Doctors were shocked to find that the new kidney they were going to give a 61-year-old man was full of parasitic worms. This nearly cost him his life. Ten weeks after the surgery, the patient was taken back to Massachusetts General Hospital (MassGen) in bad shape, throwing up, having a fever, and having trouble breathing. ...
In 1860, a farmer in the quiet Slovak village of Ivanka pri Nitre found something much more unusual than roots or rocks, a beautiful crown with gold panels buried in the ground. Historians, archaeologists, and art experts would spend the next hundred years arguing about whether this accidental discovery was the lost treasure of Byzantine ...
Astronomers have been trying to figure out what “hot Jupiters” are for decades. These are gas giants that orbit very close to their stars and complete a full revolution in just a few hours. But their rarer cousins, double hot Jupiters, are even more mysterious. In a binary star system, two of these planets orbit ...
A chance museum discovery has led paleontologists to identify a new species of ancient reptile, Sphenodraco scandentis, that likely lived in trees during the Late Jurassic. Published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the study combines two fossil slabs separated for nearly a century, offering fresh insight into the evolution and ecology of ...
The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, has been covered in an unexpected layer of snow. In this area, rain is measured in millimetres and decades can go by without a single drop. The rare storm put the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), one of the world’s most advanced radio telescopes, into “survival mode,” ...
Astronomers have found a rare Jupiter-sized planet hiding at the edge of the Milky Way using a phenomenon that Albert Einstein predicted more than a hundred years ago. This is part of a cosmic detective story that has been going on for years. Gravitational microlensing, which uses the bending of space-time itself, found the exoplanet ...
A new diver-operated microscope is revolutionizing coral research by allowing scientists to observe photosynthesis and microalgae behavior directly in the ocean. Developed by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Benthic Underwater Microscope Imaging PAM (BUMP) offers unprecedented access to coral bleaching and how they respond to environmental stress. A Technological Leap for Coral ...
Scientists have been trying to figure out what a strange patch of cold water in the North Atlantic is for years. Climate change has caused the rest of the world’s oceans to steadily warm, but the North Atlantic Warming Hole has cooled by up to 0.5°F (0.3°C) over the past century, which was not what ...
