The Kilopower reactor is tiny, and it could power the spacecraft of the future. ...read more

Just one incident can make the brain overreact to future experiences. Researchers believe the solution is to reframe and retrain. ...read more

When an economics student starts practicing medicine on his classmates, real doctors have to step in. ...read more

Using neutrons, materials scientists develop a method that goes below the surface. ...read more

Scientists are still sorting out the chemistry, health effects and origins of this tasty treat, first enjoyed in South America more than 5,000 years ago. ...read more

Advance research about heart health, early childhood development, animal lifespans, and more. Then, mark your calendars! Citizen Science Day is April 13. Sign up to join the global Megathon and help us accelerate research on Alzheimer’s! Participate from home or join a team at a local library. Librarians: Check out the free Citizen Science Day webinars featured below. Then register your library if you’d like to get involved in Citizen Science Day 2019. Che ...read more

In 2010, extraordinary circumstances allowed geneticists to reconstruct the first full genome of an ancient human: the DNA came from a hairball, frozen 4,000 years in Greenland soil. Since then, methods have improved so much in cost and efficiency that individual papers now report genomic data from hundreds of dead people (here, here, here). Ancient DNA (aDNA) has now been published from well over 2,000 human ancestors, stretching as far back as 430,000 years ago. But around 70 percent of ...read more

(Inside Science) -- There are enough nuclear weapons in the world to cause atomic Armageddon many times over, according to scientists, who estimate that no country could fire more than 100 nuclear warheads without wreaking such devastation that their own citizens back home would be killed. Most nuclear nations recognized by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- namely, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States -- have set about reducing their arsenals. C ...read more

Like humans throughout history, it turns out that dung beetles are celestial navigators. Steering is important to dung beetles. When a choice load drops, they want to grab their ball and roll away in as straight a line as they can manage. In this sense, they’re not so much navigating (which implies a destination), but they are orienting themselves by the skies. Dung beetles who work during the day can use the sun. But nocturnal dung beetles rely on moonlight – and that waxes and wan ...read more

Meanwhile, the Earth as a whole continues to ride the up-escalator of human-caused global warming Two U.S. agencies have reported on how Earth's climate fared in 2018. For the most part, the news wasn't all that surprising: The long-term trend of human-caused global warming showed no significant signs of relenting. But I was surprised by one finding: The United States experienced something of a split climatic personality last year. More about that in a minute. First, though, NASA a ...read more