It’s Nobel time: Committees traditionally announce the recipients throughout the month of October. In honor of this year’s winners, let’s take a look at some stats on laureates of bygone years. (This data excludes information related to peace, literature and economic sciences prizes.) ...read more

Experts are uncovering millennia of history under a Turkish megacity’s outskirts. When Sengül Aydıngün first started surveying the shores of Küçükçekmece Lake in the western suburbs of Istanbul, colleagues doubted she’d find any evidence of ancient human settlement; other researchers had already surveyed the area and hadn’t turned up much. But the area’s geography and water resources looked favorable for early habitation, and he ...read more

I don’t remember my first language anymore, or at least not most of it. When I was 2, I immigrated with my family into the United States from South India, and we all spoke Tamil. I didn’t know any English before I started school, so when my teachers noticed I was behind, my parents decided to stop speaking to me in Tamil. This was a common approach in the 1980s. Now, educators are more aware of the value of bilingualism. I haven’t completely lost my connection to it. I still he ...read more

Gene Therapy for Muscular Dystrophy We’re one step closer to treating Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a severe type of the degenerative disorder that breaks down a person’s musculature. The inherited condition, most common in boys, results from a lack of dystrophin, a protein that’s essential for healthy muscles. An international team of experts developed an injection that restored the function of dystophin-expressing genes in 12 golden retrievers. The dogs saw a significant rever ...read more

As a young biologist studying how wounds heal, Min Zhao found that he could quicken cellular repairs by exposing an injury to electricity. But the process remained enigmatic until an experiment by one of his graduate students failed to achieve the desired result. The more that new tissue drew toward the current on one side of the wound, the more the other side recoiled. What the student had accidentally found, according to Zhao, is that current directs the movement of cells, and the effect is so ...read more

A 37-year-old man’s sudden lapse into mania and paranoia eludes diagnosis until a final clue emerges. Kurt, like many patients brought to the psychiatric emergency room, arrived at the hospital in handcuffs. “We’ve got a streaker,” said the triage nurse. On a cold December evening, something sent this 37-year-old man running naked through the streets. Kurt had argued with the staff at the rental office in his apartment complex. When they threatened to evict him if he ...read more

And millions of lives may be at risk. Just 10 kilometers from the frenetic pulse of central Naples, in stark contrast to the Italian city’s impressive volcanic-stone churches and effortlessly stylish urbanites, sits a boxy, concrete building. Inside this unremarkable government outpost, accessed through a pair of sliding glass doors, is the Vesuvius Observatory monitoring room, lit by the cool glow of 92 flat-panel screens. On each screen, volcanic activity readings, including those f ...read more

It takes a lot of pressure to recreate an erection like this. Photo by Vladimir Wrangel Perhaps the hardest part about studying marine mammal reproductive anatomy using organs collected from deceased animals is that they can’t get an erection the easy way. Reinflating human penises postmortem is a relatively trivial feat, says Diane Kelly, a research assistant professor at University of Massachusetts and penis inflation expert. Like most mammal ...read more

A drone hovers for a few seconds in the whale’s blow to collect a sample.(Credit: Michael Moore, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) While the SnotBot drone has been highly publicized for its aerial maneuvers over blowholes, but its expeditions have yet to showcase some hard data about whales. But there’s another whale snot-gathering team out there using drones—and they’ve turned those misty explosions into some interesting biological data about whales. After collectin ...read more