For 100 years, insulin has been the primary treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D) and despite being a lifesaver for millions, it is far from perfect. New clinical trials indicate that semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, may be the first significant add-on therapy for T1D since the introduction of insulin in 1921. ...
Last month, workmen building things in Argentina unearthed a skull that looked weird. This made stories about aliens and ancient mysteries spread like wildfire. The bones of a toddler who died at least 700 years ago looked a lot like the long-headed aliens who are sometimes depicted in science fiction. But archaeologists immediately put a ...
The Wandan mud volcano in southern Taiwan recently erupted in a dramatic display of bubbling earth and man-made fire. It was a show that combined the raw power of nature with the cleverness of people. For almost 11 hours, four vents spewed mud up to 6.6 feet (2 meters) high. People lit the methane gas ...
NASA’s Terra satellite took a stunning picture of the cosmos in May 2015. It showed six Atlantic islands painting the sky with swirling, hypnotic cloud spirals that covered more than 260,000 square miles (670,000 km²). These “von Kármán vortices” are one of the most beautiful atmospheric dances in nature. They got their name from the ...
Think about a smartphone that fixes its own broken circuits, a laptop that gets better after a spill, or a fitness tracker that you can wear every day and never have to worry about it dying. This isn’t science fiction; self-healing circuit boards are about to become a reality. This is a big step forward ...
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 ...
