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 […]

Robots are taking “dress for success” to a whole other level. A new type of shape-shifting robot can undergo complete metamorphosis in a matter of minutes. The bot is composed of a simple metal cube that wraps itself in various high-tech origami sheets that fold into wings, wheels and other appendages for getting around. By […]

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 […]

Life’s great diversity has revealed itself in more than 600 pieces of floating tsunami debris that have landed on the western coast of North America. Of nearly 300 living animal and protist species documented on the debris, which crossed the Pacific Ocean following Japan’s destructive 2011 tsunami, researchers analyzed in detail 237 species, which include […]

Deblina Sarkar makes little machines, for which she has big dreams. The machines are so little, in fact, that they can humbly inhabit living cells. And her dreams are so big, they may one day save your mind.Sarkar is a nanotechnologist and assistant professor at MIT. She develops ultratiny electronic devices, some smaller than a […]