People who received kidneys from donors infected with hepatitis C did not become ill with the virus, thanks to treatment with newer drugs that can cure the disease, a small study reports. Ten patients not previously infected with hepatitis C took doses of powerful antiviral medications before and after receiving the transplants. None of the […]
LOS ANGELES — Give a graphene layer cake a twist and it superconducts — electrons flow freely through it without resistance. Made up of two layers of graphene, a form of carbon arranged in single-atom-thick sheets, the structure’s weird behavior suggests it may provide a fruitful playground for testing how certain unusual types of superconductors […]
Dramatic shifts in the East African climate may have driven toolmaking advances and the development of trading networks among Homo sapiens or their close relatives by the Middle Stone Age, roughly 320,000 years ago. That’s the implication of discoveries reported in three papers published online March 15 in Science. Newly excavated Middle Stone Age tools […]
Artificial intelligence is helping draw a more detailed map of the moon. An AI that studied lunar images to learn what craters look like has discovered thousands of new pockmarks on the moon’s surface. This program could also be used to catalog impact scars on other moons or planets, which might improve scientists’ understanding of […]
The existence of supermassive black holes in the early universe has never made much sense to astronomers. Sightings since 2006 have shown that gargantuan monsters with masses of at least a billion suns were already in place when the universe was less than a billion years old – far too early for them to have […]
“The strangest place in the whole universe might just be right here.” So says actor Will Smith, narrating the opening moments of a new documentary series about the wonderful unlikeliness of our own planet, Earth. One Strange Rock, premiering March 26 on the National Geographic Channel, is itself a peculiar and unlikely creation. Executive produced […]
“Pop” goes the knuckle — but why? Scientists disagree over why cracking your knuckles makes noise. Now, a new mathematical explanation suggests the sound results from the partial collapse of tiny gas bubbles in the joints’ fluid. Most explanations of knuckle noise involve bubbles, which form under the low pressures induced by finger manipulations that […]
Shimmering, gelatinous comb jellies wouldn’t appear to have much to hide. But their mostly see-through bodies cloak a nervous system unlike that of any other known animal, researchers report in the April 21 Science. In the nervous systems of everything from anemones to aardvarks, electrical impulses pass between nerve cells, allowing for signals to move […]
Northern elephant seals are the true masters of the power nap. On long trips out to sea, the seals snooze less than 20 minutes at a time, researchers report in the April 21 Science. The animals average just two hours of shut-eye per day while swimming offshore for months — rivaling African elephants for the […]
MINNEAPOLIS — Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, new observations suggest. An excess of positrons zipping past Earth suggests that the bubbles are the result of a burp from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole after a meal millions of years […]