How big is the sun? Well, that depends on when you’re measuring. The sun slightly shrinks and expands as it goes through a solar cycle, a roughly 11-year period of high and low magnetic activity, a new study finds. When the sun is the most active, its radius decreases by 1 or 2 kilometers, two […]
Much like someone listening to a conversation at a crowded party, a new artificial intelligence can tune out background noise in videos to hear what a particular person on screen is saying. Humans are naturally good at focusing on specific voices amidst the din — a phenomenon known as the cocktail party effect (SN Online: […]
It’s easy to tell a male from a female shark. Flip it over. If it has a pair of claspers — finger-like extensions jutting from the end of the pelvic fins — it is male; no claspers means female. Like a penis, claspers deliver sperm inside the female. That was marine biologist Alissa Barnes’ understanding […]
For sauropods — the largest animals known to have walked on Earth — there may have been more than one way to get gigantic. Most early relatives of the herbivorous dinosaurs have a suite of features once thought to be the essential blueprint for gigantism, such as sturdy pillarlike legs, elongated necks and forelimbs, and […]
About 540 million years ago, the oceans were an alien landscape, devoid of swimming, or nektonic, creatures. Some scientists have hypothesized, based on fossil evidence, that swimmers suddenly dominated in the oceans during the Devonian Period, between 419 million and 359 million years ago. But an in-depth study of marine fossils now suggests that this […]
A telescope on Earth has snapped pictures of Neptune at least as clear as those from the Hubble Space Telescope. The trick? Taking the twinkle out of stars. Released by the European Southern Observatory on July 18, the images come from a new observing system on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The instrument uses […]
Only a day after the first test-tube baby turned 40, a poll about American’s attitudes toward tweaking unborn babies’ genes reveals the hopes and hesitations of being on the brink of the latest reproductive era. Americans generally favor gene editing, but only for heading off diseases. Boosting intelligence would be “taking medical technology too far,” […]
Women face an uphill battle in biomedical science, on many fronts. There is bias in hiring and in how other scientists view their research. Fewer women are chosen to review scientific papers. Men still outnumber women at the ivory tower’s highest floors, and of course, women in science face harassment based on their gender. But […]
For the first time, researchers have created lungs in the lab and successfully transplanted them into pigs. These bioengineered lungs, described online August 1 in Science Translational Medicine, developed healthy blood vessels that allowed pigs to live for several weeks after surgery. That’s a significant improvement from previous efforts: Lab-grown lungs implanted in rodents failed […]
BOSTON — Many sunlike stars are eerie clones, but ours is an individual. A study of solar twins reveals that the sun’s chemical makeup is surprisingly different from that of its nearby peers, while those stars are almost identical to one another. Since a star and its planets are made from the same materials, that […]