Bits of a protein that builds up in Parkinson’s disease trigger the immune system, causing it to tag them as foreign invaders. In a blood test, immune cells called T cells became activated when exposed to the protein in about 40 percent of Parkinson’s patients in a new study. This autoimmune response may contribute to […]

The most distant star ever observed has been spotted, and its light comes from across two-thirds of the universe. That puts the star a whopping 9 billion light-years away. Patrick Kelly at the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues found the star in Hubble Space Telescope images of a galaxy cluster called MACS J1149. […]

DNA is setting the record straight on ancient Canaanites. For the first time, scientists have deciphered the complete genetic instruction manuals of Canaanites. By comparing five Canaanite genomes with those of other ancient and modern populations, the researchers identified the Canaanites’ ancestors and discovered their descendants, modern Lebanese people. The results, reported online July 27 […]

The Great American Eclipse on August 21 will be much more than a spectacle. As the moon passes in front of the sun, scientists will be doing some serious work. A fleet of telescopes, spectrometers and polarizers will turn skyward to look directly at the parts of our nearest star that are usually invisible. But […]

Nighttime may be snow-time on Mars. Low evening temperatures could cool clouds and trigger turbulent winds that fuel fast-falling snowstorms on the Red Planet, new simulations suggest. This process, reported August 21 in Nature Geoscience, may account for surprising observations of snowfall by one of NASA’s Martian landers. “Clouds and snowfall have emerged in recent […]

Just as modern cities struggle with lead pollution, so may have ancient Rome. And muddy waters preserved the city’s legacy of lead pipes, a new study suggests. Researchers examined lead levels in dirt drilled from two Roman harbor sites, Ostia and Portus, on the Tiber River. The samples spanned 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000. Up […]

Sputnik is feeling the love. The huge heart-shaped plain on Pluto, made famous when the New Horizons spacecraft flew past in 2015, can keep its name. It and 13 other surface features on the dwarf planet have been assigned official nomenclature, the International Astronomical Union announced September 7. Objects in the Pluto system are traditionally […]

Microbes are pushing glacial snow into the red. An alga species that grows on glaciers gives the snow a crimson hue, which increases the amount of sunlight that the snow soaks up and makes it melt faster, new measurements confirm. On Alaska’s Harding Icefield, these microbes are responsible for about a sixth of the snowmelt […]

Biologist Luhan Yang dreams of pig organs that will one day fly — into people. If she has her way, animal farms will raise herds of bioengineered pigs, designed to produce kidneys, livers and other organs that could be transplanted into humans. Animal parts would slip seamlessly into people, easing their suffering. “There are millions […]

A new discovery is turning the hemispheric history of a mysterious whale species upside-down. Two fossils recently unearthed in Italy and Japan suggest that a southern whale was briefly a denizen of northern waters more than half a million years ago. Until now, all available evidence suggested that the pygmy right whale, Caperea marginata, and […]