Science

In 2005, I was navigating winding roads through the Drakensberg Mountains, in Lesotho, Southern Africa. Towering cliff-like features known as escarpments interrupt the landscape, rising up by a kilometer or more. Taken aback by the dramatic scenery, I was struck by a question: how on Earth did it form?

The outer shell of our planet is fractured into seven or eight major sections, or tectonic plates, on which the continents sit. We expect to see the continents rise up at the active boundaries of these plates, where volcanism and earthquakes are often concentrated.

The FDA has approved an updated covid shot for everyone 6 months old and up, which renews a now-annual quandary for Americans: Get the shot now, with the latest covid outbreak sweeping the country, or hold it in reserve for the winter wave?

The new vaccine should provide some protection to everyone. But many healthy people who have already been vaccinated or have immunity because they’ve been exposed to covid enough times may want to wait a few months.

The conditions within a person’s home, family and community affect their ability to stay healthy. Scientists studying these social determinants of health are trying to understand whether nature or nurture has a stronger effect on a person’s ability to fight disease.

I am a developmental physiologist studying the ways that drinking affects fetal development and lifelong health. Although researchers have long recognized that a father’s alcohol abuse negatively affects his children’s mental health and social development, it hasn’t been clear if paternal drinking has any lasting biological effects on his offspring’s physical health.

A person in the northeastern U.S. state of New Hampshire has died after contracting the rare mosquito-borne eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus, health authorities announced Tuesday.

The patient, identified only as an adult from the town of Hampstead, was hospitalized with severe central nervous system disease and later succumbed to the illness, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) said in a statement.

SpaceX on Tuesday postponed once more its attempt at launching a daring orbital expedition featuring an all-civilian crew that is aiming to carry out the first-ever spacewalk by private citizens.

The Polaris Dawn mission, organized by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, had been set to lift off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a four-hour window early Wednesday.

People with brain lesions are more susceptible to religious fundamentalism, according to a study authored by a Harvard University neurology instructor.

Michael Ferguson, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, published a paper along with several other academic experts on brain research about the impact of religious fundamentalism on those with brain lesions.

As 55 million people in the U.S. Midwest faced heat alerts on Monday, research published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association showed that heat-related deaths in the country rose 117% between 1999 and 2023.

"The current trajectory that we're on, in terms of warming and the change in the climate, is starting to actually show up in increased deaths," lead author Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio, toldUSA Today. "That's something that we hadn't had measured before."

Climate change is fuelling an alarming increase in deadly lightning strikes in India, killing nearly 1,900 people a year in the world's most populous country, scientists warn.

Lightning caused a staggering 101,309 deaths between 1967 and 2020, with a sharp increase between 2010 and 2020, a team of researchers led by Fakir Mohan University in the eastern state of Odisha said.

SpaceX on Monday pushed back the historic launch of an all-civilian crew on an orbital expedition set to mark a new chapter in space exploration with the first spacewalk by private citizens.

The Polaris Dawn mission, organized by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, was set to lift off early Tuesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, but is now targeting early Wednesday after a late technical hitch.

US computer giant IBM confirmed Monday it would close its research and development arm in China.

Multiple employees told AFP they had been informed during a brief meeting with US executives on Monday that the company would gut its research and development team in China and move operations to another country.

In experiments at the Brookhaven National Lab in the US, an international team of physicists has detected the heaviest “anti-nuclei” ever seen. The tiny, short-lived objects are composed of exotic antimatter particles.

The measurements of how often these entities are produced and their properties confirms our current understanding of the nature of antimatter, and will help the search for another mysterious kind of particles – dark matter – in deep space.

Aging is a biological process that no one can avoid. Ideally, growing old should be a time to relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Aging also has a darker side, however, often linked to disease.

Every second, your cells perform billions of biochemical reactions that fuel essential functions for life, forming a highly interconnected metabolic network. This network enables cells to grow, proliferate and repair themselves, and its disruption can drive the aging process.