Science news: research breakthroughs and discoveries across physics, biology, and medicine.
Scientists have found a feather in one of the least glamorous places imaginable: inside a piece of fossilized dinosaur poop, 66 million years old. And this strange little time capsule may help answer one of the biggest questions in natural…
Vaccines work differently in different people, and for the first time, artificial intelligence may be able to predict how strongly someone will respond before the injection ever happens. Researchers analyzed antibody patterns from more than 4,000 people and found signs…
The diet wars have a new scoreboard. In a clinical trial involving people with obesity, prediabetes, and fatty liver disease, a ketogenic diet outperformed both the Mediterranean diet and a low-fat diet on several key measures of metabolic health. The…
A therapy famous for fighting cancer has just delivered a result that rheumatoid arthritis patients have dreamed about for decades. CAR T-cell therapy dramatically reduced disease activity in six people with severe rheumatoid arthritis who had resisted every other treatment,…
A natural compound hiding in blueberries, grapes, and other berries may convince your muscles to burn excess fat instead of storing it, according to scientists in Japan who identified the effect in muscle cells. The compound, pterostilbene, is a close…
What if your personality was written in your DNA? A massive genetic study has linked more than 1,200 genetic variants to the Big Five personality traits, the scientific model that describes human character through openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.…
Earth’s climate may carry the fingerprints of a journey we barely notice: the Sun’s slow orbit around the center of the Milky Way. New NASA-funded studies suggest our planet’s climate has been influenced by both the Sun’s travels through dense…
The universe is running out of stars, but maybe not for the reason astronomers thought. Star formation across the cosmos has fallen dramatically over the past 4.5 billion years, and a new study has uncovered a surprising twist: the supply…
For decades, chemists believed they knew exactly what made nickel such a good catalyst for converting methane. They were wrong, in the most interesting way possible. New research shows that a tiny atomic structure that forms on nickel oxide during…
Artificial intelligence has found something in our DNA that decades of lab work had struggled to pin down: the distinctive sequence signature of a key genetic “switch” — the element that decides whether a gene is turned on or off.…