What We Learned from the Perseverance Rover’s First Year on Mars

One year ago NASA’s Perseverance rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere and safely landed in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide gouge that scientists suspect once hosted a deep, long-lived lake. The rover’s ultimate target is near Jezero’s western edge: a large, fan-shaped pile of sediments that washed into the basin through a notch in the crater … Read more

COVID Dominated Their Science Lives: Here’s What Four Experts Learned over Two Years

Amesh Adalja, Rupali Limaye, Jeffrey Shaman and Brian Wahl all know SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, inside and out. Adalja, an ER doctor and biosecurity specialist, saw this pandemic coming back in 2018 when he headed a report called The Characteristics of Pandemic Pathogens. It states, “The most probable naturally occurring [global catastrophic biological risk]–level threat that humans face is … Read more

What We Learned From a Dead Star Erupting With The Fire And Fury of 100,000 Suns

In a nearby galaxy, a rare kind of dead star erupted into a giant outburst. This in itself may not be so peculiar; but, for the first time, changes in its brightness during this event have been documented in detail, giving scientists a window into understanding the processes that produce these colossal flares.   The … Read more

9 things we learned about aliens in 2021

A “doughnut UFO” in the skies over Switzerland. Strange green lights vanishing into the clouds above Canada. A saucer-shaped blob plunging suddenly into the ocean. The year 2021 gave truth-seekers and alien hunters no shortage of mysteries to ponder. But it also gave them answers — from a hotly anticipated Pentagon report on military UFO … Read more

Two years of covid-19: How the pandemic has unfolded so far, what we’ve learned, and the questions that remain

It’s now been two years since Chinese authorities first informed the World Health Organization about an unknown virus in Wuhan. How has our understanding of the virus changed since then and where does that leave us? Health 31 December 2021 By Helen Thomson A new hospital was rapidly built in Wuhan, China, in early 2020 … Read more

The 10 wildest things we learned about black holes in 2021

Scientists who study black holes can rest assured that their field will deliver astounding and mind-bending findings, year after year. And 2021 was no exception, with many exciting new results regarding these strange gravitational beasts. Here, we take a look at this year’s most captivating black hole discoveries and how they’ve advanced our understanding of … Read more

We Learned the Wrong Lessons from the Tuskegee ‘Experiment’

Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. Rarely a day goes by without national news stories about vaccine hesitancy: how many people say they definitely will or … Read more

This Robot Learned to Solve a Maze Using Mammal-Like ‘Brain’ Circuits For Memory

Rather than engineering robotic solutions from scratch, some of our most impressive advances have come from copying what nature has already come up with. New research shows how we can extend that approach to robot ‘minds’, in this case by getting a robot to learn the best route out of a maze all by itself – even … Read more