Science

The sight of hundreds of thousands of bats streaming from their roost at dusk is one of nature’s great spectacles. Swarms can be so dense they resemble rising smoke at a distance. But the aerial antics of the birds of prey that hunt them are just as astonishing.

Studying these behaviors in a remote corner of the Chihuahuan Desert (which stretches from the southwest US to Mexico) has been a highlight of my almost 25-year career as a biologist studying animal flight. My team’s study was done in collaboration with bat scientist Laura Kloepper (University of New Hampshire).

In July, a puzzling new image of a distant extreme star system surrounded by surreal concentric geometric rungs had even astronomers scratching their heads. The picture, which looks like a kind of “cosmic thumbprint”, came from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s newest flagship observatory.

The internet immediately lit up with theories and speculation. Some on the wild fringe even claimed it as evidence for “alien megastructures” of unknown origin.

The extreme weather that has battered much of the U.S. in 2022 doesn’t just affect humans. Heat waves, wildfires, droughts and storms also threaten many wild species – including some that already face other stresses.

I’ve been researching bee health for over 10 years, with a focus on honey bees. In 2021, I began hearing for the first time from beekeepers about how extreme drought and rainfall were affecting bee colony health.

DNA profiling is frequently in the news. Public interest is sparked when DNA is used to identify a suspect or human remains, or resolves a cold case that seems all but forgotten.

Very occasionally, it is in the media when the process doesn’t work as it should.

In the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, developing more contraception options for everyone becomes even more important.

Women and people who can become pregnant have a number of effective birth control methods available, including oral pills, patches, injections, implants, vaginal rings, IUDs and sterilization. But for men and people who produce sperm, options have been limited. Two options, withdrawal and condoms, both have high failure rates. Withdrawal has a failure rate of about 20%. Condoms have a failure rate of only 2% when used correctly, but that rate rises to 13% based on how people typically use them. Vasectomies have a failure rate of less than 1%, but they require minimally invasive surgery and are seen as a permanent method of contraception. Neither vasectomies nor withdrawal protect against sexually transmitted infections.

The world's wildlife populations have declined by more than two-thirds since 1970 as forests have been cleared and oceans polluted, according to an assessment released on Thursday.

This "serious drop … tells us that nature is unraveling and the natural world is emptying," said Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

Scientists have successfully implanted and integrated human brain cells into newborn rats, creating a new way to study complex psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, and perhaps eventually test treatments.

Studying how these conditions develop is incredibly difficult -- animals do not experience them like people, and humans cannot simply be opened up for research.

NASA on Tuesday celebrated exceeding expectations during a mission to deflect a distant asteroid, in a sci-fi like test of humanity's ability to stop an incoming cosmic object from devastating life on Earth.

The fridge-sized Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor deliberately smashed into the moonlet asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, pushing it into a smaller, faster orbit around its big brother Didymos, NASA chief Bill Nelson announced.

With just an incubator and some broth, researchers can grow reusable filters made of bacteria to clean up polluted water, detect chemicals in the environment and protect surfaces from rust and mold.

I am a synthetic biologist who studies engineered living materials – substances made from living cells that have a variety of functions. In my recently published research, I programmed bacteria to form living materials that can not only be modified for different applications, but are also quick and easy to produce.

Looking up at the moon in the night sky, you would never imagine that it is slowly moving away from Earth. But we know otherwise. In 1969, NASA’s Apollo missions installed reflective panels on the moon. These have shown that the moon is currently moving 3.8 cm away from the Earth every year.

If we take the moon’s current rate of recession and project it back in time, we end up with a collision between the Earth and moon around 1.5 billion years ago. However, the moon was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, meaning that the current recession rate is a poor guide for the past.