The pandemic’s slowing of research productivity may last years—especially for women and parents | Science

The pandemic led to a surge in COVID-19 research, but it severely disrupted other fields—shuttering labs, restricting travel, and leaving scientists with young children struggling to work without adequate child care. A flurry of studies indicates the productivity of women scientists slowed during the pandemic to a greater extent than their male colleagues. Now, a … Read more

Science Has Devastating News About Pollen Season as The US Climate Keeps Changing

Brace yourselves, allergy suffers – new research shows pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change. Our latest study finds that the US will face up to a 200 percent increase in total pollen this century if the world continues producing carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants … Read more

People, Not Science, Decide When a Pandemic Is Over

All pandemics end eventually. But how, exactly, will we know when the COVID-19 pandemic is really “over”? It turns out the answer to that question may lie more in sociology than epidemiology. As the world passes the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the COVID pandemic, things seem to be at a … Read more

Ukrainian researchers flee trauma and terror of war | Science

At this time of year Maryna Kravchenko, a population ecologist at Kharkiv National University (KNU), normally heads into the forests of eastern Ukraine to track frogs and toads emerging from hibernation. Instead, after 1 week sheltering from bombs in a basement, she fled with her young children to Germany, where colleagues at Ludwig Maximilian University … Read more

African effort to sequence continent’s biodiversity seeks $1 billion over 10 years | Science

When ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer left southeast Nigeria to start a biochemistry Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2013, he soon realized little information on the genomes of plants and animals from Africa were in existing global sequencing databases. To help protect the continent’s biodiversity and aid its agriculture, he and colleagues founded the African … Read more

Russia’s Ukraine invasion could imperil international science

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced at least 1 million people to flee their homes, and has already seen thousands of Ukrainian civilians killed, could also have wide-reaching and prolonged ramifications for scores of industries and organizations, including many designed to be apolitical. Global efforts that could suffer include international science collaborations, which … Read more

Preprint server removes ‘inflammatory’ papers in superconductor controversy | Science

A debate over claims of room temperature superconductivity has now boiled over into the realm of scientific publishing. Administrators of arXiv, the widely used physics preprint server, recently removed or refused to post several papers from the opposing sides, saying their manuscripts include inflammatory content and unprofessional language. ArXiv has also banned one of the … Read more

People, Not Science, Decide When a Pandemic Is Over

All pandemics end eventually. But how, exactly, will we know when the COVID-19 pandemic is really “over”? It turns out the answer to that question may lie more in sociology than epidemiology. As the world passes the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the COVID pandemic, things seem to be at a … Read more

A Giant Tortoise Species Unknown to Science Has Been Discovered in Galapagos

A new species of giant tortoise has been discovered in the Galapagos after DNA testing found animals living on one island had not yet been recorded, Ecuador’s environment ministry said.   Researchers compared the genetic material of tortoises currently living on San Cristobal with bones and shells collected in 1906 from a cave in the … Read more

NASA Is Cracking Open a 50-Year-Old Vacuum-Sealed Tube of Lunar Gas And Soil

The Apollo missions to the Moon brought a total of 2,196 rock samples to Earth. But NASA has only just started opening one of the last ones, collected 50 years ago. For all that time, some tubes were kept sealed so that they could be studied years later, with the help of the latest technical … Read more