houssem23 
A flurry of intense and wild swings in climate conditions may have fueled the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. A recreation of how ancient sea surface temperatures, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and land masses interacted revealed an Earth plagued by nearly a decade of drought, fires and floods. Researchers knew that a rise in … Read more
When the virus that causes mpox jumped onto the international stage in 2022, countries around the world, including the United States, turned to vaccines targeting the closely related smallpox virus to curb its spread. Yet it wasn’t until 2024 that Africa, the continent where the virus emerged and first began spreading among people, received its … Read more
Among the more than 500 species of bacteria that thrive in the human mouth, one seems to play by its own rules. Rather than reproducing by splitting itself in two, like most bacteria do, Corynebacterium matruchotii divides into as many as 14 cells simultaneously, researchers report in the Sept. 10 Proceedings of the National Academy … Read more
Over the last 485 million years, Earth has been both a lot colder and a lot hotter than once thought. A new temperature timeline that combines geologic data with computational simulations reveals a rich, detailed and dramatic picture of the ebb and flow of icehouse and greenhouse conditions on Earth throughout this span of time, … Read more
One of the world’s richest biodiversity hot spots is Peru’s Madre de Dios, a region of the Amazon nestled at the base of the Andes mountains. When biogeochemist Jacqueline Gerson first traveled there in 2017, she found herself on a boat headed downstream through the forest. As the riverbanks passed by, she observed a scenic … Read more
One of the most remarkable things about the human brain is that it changes. A lot. This ability to reinvent itself, to morph, to strengthen some connections and let others fall away, captivates Andrea Gomez. A molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Gomez spends her time trying to figure out how … Read more
For the first time, astronomers have watched gas boil and bubble on the surface of a distant star. Scientists observed the red giant star R Doradus with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile over the course of four weeks in July and August 2023. The series of images shows large cells of … Read more
Black holes about the size of a hydrogen atom could be careening through the solar system unnoticed. But their days of stealth may be numbered. Two teams of researchers propose methods to search for these tiny, hypothetical objects, which would have the mass of an asteroid. Because they would have formed in the universe’s infancy, … Read more
TV stars and terrorists may appear to have little in common. But after watching YouTube videos by members of a violent terrorist organization, Yotam Ophir realized the two groups deploy similar tactics to connect with remote audiences. The terrorists dressed casually, stared straight at the camera when talking and narrated their pasts in gripping, plot-driven … Read more
As the youthful universe congealed under the pull of gravity, matter knotted itself into galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments, weaving a dazzlingly intricate cosmic web. This web’s structure is thanks, in part, to the handiwork of neutrinos — lightweight, subatomic particles that surge through the cosmos in unimaginable numbers. Because they streak about at high … Read more