Juan Celedón, a respected pulmonary researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, wanted to address an urgent national problem. Severe asthma attacks send hundreds of thousands of U.S. children to the hospital every year. For decades, researchers have suspected extra vitamin D—essential for bone growth and healthy development, and also an […]
The school holidays are here, and parents struggling to get their children to bed will no doubt be thinking: what is wrong with you? I would do anything to get more sleep! Children seem to do everything possible to avoid sleep, yet many adults can’t seem to get enough of it. […]
Small children learn language at a pace far faster than teenagers or adults. One explanation for this learning advantage comes not from differences between children and adults, but from the differences in the way that people talk to children and adults. For the first time, a team of researchers developed […]
When humans look out at a visual landscape like a sunset or a beautiful overlook, we experience something — we have a conscious awareness of what that scene looks like. This awareness of the visual world around us is central to our everyday existence, but are humans the only species […]
Kubaha, a male mountain gorilla in Rwanda, hangs out with orphaned gorillas in his social group. DIAN FOSSEY GORILLA FUND A few years ago, four female mountain gorillas left home, abandoning not only their mate—a sick alpha silverback—but their infants, which were barely old enough to feed themselves. They may […]
A global study finds that species numbers reported in the wild fell sharply between 1990 and 2015. PHOTOGRAPH: DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The number of wild bee species recorded by an international database of life on earth has declined by a quarter […]
Over millions of years, most living organisms suffocated in oxygen-deprived oceans. In the aftermath, modern vertebrates conquered the world. (Credit: Rich Carey/Shutterstock) We think of mass extinctions as brief moments of havoc — profoundly devastating but over within a geologic instant. The Devonian, the second of the so-called “Big Five,” […]
When NASA’s Voyager spacecraft visited Saturn’s moon Enceladus, they found a body with young, reflective, icy surface features. Some parts of the surface were older and marked with craters, but the rest had clearly been resurfaced. It was clear evidence that Enceladus was geologically active. The moon is also close to Saturn’s E-ring, and […]
Kötlujökull, the fourth largest glacier in Iceland, hosts abundant microorganisms sustained by hydrogen produced by weathering of basaltic bedrock. Credit: Eric S. Boyd. Using years of data collected from ice-covered habitats all over the world, a Montana State University team has discovered new insights into the processes that support microbial […]
This illustration shows some of what we know about this enigmatic process. This is your brain on dreams. Stephanie Unger You dream for two hours every night, but for something so common, it’s a remarkably enigmatic process. Only in the past few decades, with the advance of technology like fMRIs […]