How flamingos sleep while standing on one leg
After a long day at the zoo, sore feet and stiff legs might make you wonder how flamingos get any shuteye while precariously standing atop a single stiltlike leg. To figure out how they do it, scientists placed juvenile flamingos atop a fo...
Why whales grew to such monster sizes
Weighing in at 200,000 kilograms and stretching the length of a basketball court, the blue whale is the biggest animal that’s ever lived. Now, scientists have figured out why they and other baleen whales got so huge.
“It’s a cool study,” sa...
Jeff Djevdet/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Academies calculate how much Brexit will cost U.K. researchers
Some academic fields in the United Kingdom will have major funding holes to fill once the country leaves the European Union, according to new research commissioned by four ...
Ian Lipkin is being sued by his long-time collaborator Mady Hornig.
JOSHUA BRIGHT/The New York Times
Lawsuit at Columbia University roils prominent chronic fatigue syndrome research lab
A sex discrimination lawsuit filed last week has exposed a nasty fight roiling one...
Tedros says he will work tirelessly to fulfill the promise of universal health coverage.
Valentin Flauraud/Keystone via AP
Former Ethiopian health minister becomes first African head of the World Health Organization
For the first time in its history, the World Healt...
President Donald J. Trump
Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
What’s in Trump’s 2018 budget request for science?
President Donald Trump unveiled his full 2018 budget request to Congress today. The spending plan, for the fiscal year that begins 1 October, f...
Newly discovered pre-human remains dated to more than seven million years ago could change common assumptions about the origins of humanity, suggesting that people may have diverged from great apes hundreds of thousands of years earlier than experts had previously thought.
In fact, in a...
Another explanation for the dimming is that KIC 8462852 is surrounded by a swarm of dusty comets.
JPL-Caltech/NASA
Star that spurred alien megastructure theories dims again
Astronomers and alien life enthusiasts alike are buzzing over the sudden dimming of an otherw...
Mouse pups born from sperm stored on the International Space Station for 9 months.
S. Wakayama et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, 21 (23 May 2017) © 2017 National Academy of Sciences
Sperm frozen in space produce healthy mouse pups
If...
Blockchain, the cryptographic technology behind the digital currency bitcoin, could also be adapted for environmental purposes, such as guaranteeing that fish sold to consumers come from labeled sources, such as these salmon farms in Norway.
Andrey Armyagov/Alamy Stoc...
