Confronted with the unusual cause of his symptoms, a secretive patient stonewalls the doctor. ...read more

The nest of a female bagworm. (Credits: Will478/Shutterstock) Is that a cluster of miniature Lincoln Logs hanging off a branch? Not quite — what may look like a meticulous assortment of twigs is actually the home of a bagworm moth. These bug architects spend most of their short lives weaving homes out of plant debris. As larvae, the silky worms find a place to settle down and feed, such as a leaf or the branch of a tree. Then, they crawl around and collect materials like twigs, dirt ...read more

Teas, sodas, sports drinks, more: A broad variety of beverages contain caloric sweeteners, but beverage taxes don’t treat them equally. For example, 100% fruit juice generally gets a pass for nutritional reasons, even though it contains plenty of sugar that’s chemically no different than sugar added artificially. In a similar vein, among public health researchers and policymakers there’s disagreement on whether to tax sweetened milk, because the added sugar may make it more lik ...read more

The tiny rover only weighs a little over two pounds. (Credit: Spacebit) The United Kingdom is sending a small, four-legged robot to the moon in 2021. The tiny rover, which looks like a cross between a spider and a children’s toy, will be the first moon rover for the U.K. It will also be the first rover with legs to walk on the moon. Created by the private U.K.-based company, Spacebit, the tiny rover will fly on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, and be launched from Cape Canaver ...read more

An artist's representation of big data applied to DNA. (Credit: Zita/Shutterstock) At first, it was just Mendel and some pea plants. In the 150 years that followed, matching pairs of chromosomes were labeled, As, Ts Cs and Gs were coupled off and, ultimately, 3 billion base pairs were sequenced in the correct order. By the end of the decade-long global effort known as the Human Genome Project, the genetic blueprint of life was finally sketched out. Now, a smattering of scientists are joi ...read more

The male white bellbird. (Credit: Anselmo d'Affonseca) Visitors to the mountains of the northern Amazon can get unusually close to the white bellbird. Ornithologists have long suspected that this bird’s call is the loudest in the world, but a recent trek into the mountains and some careful measurements confirms that male White bellbirds do indeed have the loudest birdsong ever recorded. The observation, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, comes with some unanswered ques ...read more

The popular gene-editing tool CRISPR works by cutting out genes. A new genetic tool instead works by searching for and replacing targeted genes, without breaking DNA. (Credit: Steven McDowell/Shutterstock) Snip, snip. If you’ve been paying attention to the hubbub about gene editing, the first image that pops into your head might be of a pair of scissors. Today, when scientists use the popular gene-editing tool CRISPR, they’re essentially slicing through both strands of the iconic ...read more

This new and incredibly deep image from Hubble shows the dim and diffuse galaxy NGC 1052-DF4. New research presents the strongest evidence yet that this strange galaxy is basically devoid of dark matter. (Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/S. Danieli et al.) stronomers have all but confirmed the universe has at least one galaxy that's woefully deficient in dark matter. The new finding not only indicates that galaxies really can exist without dark matter, but also raises fundamental questions about how s ...read more

The dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 1569 is frantically forming stars. New research shows that some dwarf galaxies, however, have had their star formation halted by the supermassive black hole in their center. (Credit: HST/NASA/ESA) Astronomers know that most galaxies house supermassive black holes in their centers, from the largest galaxies down to small dwarfs. They also know that when supermassive black holes are actively feeding, they can slow or even stop the formation of stars in their home ...read more

A plume of steam flows upward from Bogoslof volcano, a partially submerged volcano that created giant underwater bubbles when it erupted in 2017. (Credit: Dave Withrow, Alaska Volcano Observatory) (Inside Science) -- As a geophysicist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, John Lyons spends much of his days trying to decipher the music of volcanic eruptions. Sensitive microphones scattered across the Aleutian Arc -- a chain of over 80 volcanoes that sweeps westward from the Alaskan peninsula -- ...read more