On a lonely planet, billions of years ago, a soup of chemicals — in the right place, at the right time, and with the right conditions — shifted from an unalive assemblage into something scientists ...

While large language models and silicon-based AI rightly command the public’s attention, scientists across multiple domains are making deep and inexorable discoveries that now dance at the precarious ...

Nicolas Rivron, a biologist now based in Austria, spent close to a decade trying to build a model mouse embryo in the lab from scratch. After years of incremental progress and occasional false leads, ...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial French paleontologist, priest, and theologian, died in April 1955, a few months before a group of eminent scientists — including, notably, Marvin Minsky and ...

On a rare, clear day, one can look due west from the Mount Wilson Observatory, perched at nearly 6,000 feet on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and see the wide basin of the San Fernando Valley. A ...

Other animals may have some capacity to grasp small numbers, but only humans have jumped on the number train and steamed ahead full throttle. As mathematician and author Richard Elwes sees it, it all ...

Alissa Deming pierced the whale’s heart on her first try. Bright arterial blood shot up the needle as she started pumping potassium chloride, a medication used to euthanize animals, into the ...

Ben Hine was 4 years old when his parents split. In his recollection, he remembers that his dad left for work one day and his uncle arrived in a van to pick up Ben and his mother, along with the ...

CROSS SECTIONS: Dissecting the contentious and the controversial — with science at the core. Some U.S. politicians are advocating for reform towards a single payer system, such as Medicare for All.

When a new presidential administration comes in, it is responsible for filling around 4,000 jobs sprinkled across the federal government’s vast bureaucracy. These political appointees help carry out ...

Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book “Empire of AI.” Hao ...

Many vaccine experts were dismayed. Members of the panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, must follow strict rules regarding conflicts. Further, some of Kennedy’s ...