All Stories
- Climate
Explainer: Understanding ice ages
Earth slowly wobbles, tilts and stretches (or contracts) as it orbits the sun. These changes may be fairly small and subtle. Still, their cumulative impacts can be huge — sometimes triggering the slow onset of an ice age or an abrupt thaw.
- Brain
Strong body helps the mind
Study finds new link between the body and brain in mice and may help explain how exercise heals.
-
Cookie Science 7: How many to bake?
I have a hypothesis and I’m baking my cookies. To collect good data, how many people will need to sample them?
- Brain
Exercise builds brawn — and brains
One 20-minute session of leg exercises improved memory recall by about 10 percent.
- Health & Medicine
News Brief: First cases of Ebola acquired outside Africa
Health workers who had worn extensive protective gear still became infected with Ebola while treating patients in Spain and the United States.
- Chemistry
Space cloud may hold clue to life’s origins
Scientists probing a cloud of dust and gas some 26,000 light-years away found a chemical with a structure resembling molecules critical for all life on Earth.
- Brain
The distracted teenage brain
Teens often show poor judgment in decision-making. Scientists have long blamed this on the fact that their brains are still developing. A new study offers another explanation: distractions form rewarding behaviors — ones that persist even after the reward itself has disappeared.
-
Teen studies how germs resist our drugs
Many bacteria become immune to the drugs meant to kill them. A high school student studied whether microbes might resist zinc as well. His findings ended up in a published paper.
- Science & Society
Teen wins Nobel for support of educating girls
Malala Yousafzai survived an attempt on her life by extremists who protested her efforts to see that girls be allowed to go to school. Upon recovery, she expanded her outreach to beyond her Pakistani homeland. She has just become the youngest-ever Nobel Prize winner.
- Computing
Models: How computers make predictions
They use numbers to model real-world activities. And new insights in math are streamlining models’ design.
- Physics
Nobel goes for creating the ‘nanoscope’
A regular microscope can’t bring into focus the nanoscale molecules from which cells are built. Using lasers and fluorescent molecules, three scientists found a way to view these tiny features. Their reward: the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
- Planets
Distant world hosts water
One measure of an extraterrestrial world’s potential for supporting life is the presence of water. The Neptune-size HAT-P-11b fits that criterion.
