Science Friday

AI is not just for automating tasks or coming up with new recipe ideas. Increasingly, people are turning to AI chatbots for companionship. Roughly half a billion people worldwide have downloaded chatb...

Geologist Steve Squyres risked his career and millions of dollars to get two rovers roaming on Mars. But the mission almost didn’t make it to the launch pad. Steve and NASA engineer Jennifer Trosper d...

Since January, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made sweeping cuts to science. It's hard to keep track of how many research grants were canceled, but they add up to hundreds of millions—pos...

The first images from the brand new Vera C. Rubin Observatory have finally been unveiled, and they show us the cosmos like never before. The camera captures so much detail that its first complete imag...

Last month, scientists reported a historic first: they gave the first personalized gene-editing treatment to a baby who was born with a rare life-threatening genetic disorder. Before the treatment, hi...

Australia is known for its unusual animal life, from koalas to kangaroos. But once upon a time, the Australian landscape had even weirder fauna, like Palorchestes azael, a marsupial with immense claws...

As a grad student, Suchitra Sebastian wasn’t sure she wanted to be a physicist. But when one of her experiments gave an unexpected result, she was hooked. Suchitra’s former PhD student Beng Sing Tan d...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started collecting data nearly three years ago, and it has already transformed our understanding of the universe. It has spotted the earliest galaxies ever seen,...

Ever noticed how some people get to their 80s and 90s and continue to be healthy and active? They spend their days playing mahjong, driving to lunch, learning shuffle dancing, and practicing Portugues...

While there are a lot of dinosaur fossils, and a lot of plant fossils, the precise connection between the two has been something of a mystery. Now, researchers report that they’ve found what’s called...

Last month, former President Joe Biden announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. The news sparked a larger conversation about what exactly the best practices are...

Biochemist Virginia Man-Yee Lee has spent a lifetime in the lab, figuring out what happens in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases. She’s made key discoveries about Parkinson's, ALS, a...

On Monday, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the panel that advises the CDC on who should get certain vaccines and when. Then on Thursday, he appointed eight new member...

This week, China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft sent back its first image from space. It’s headed to a rendezvous with the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa, one of Earth’s “quasi-moons,” where it will collect samples in...

The prairie might just be the most underappreciated landscape in the United States. Beginning in the early 1800s, the majority of these grasslands were converted into big industrial farms. Now, some u...

Bedbug infestations are not just a modern problem—these pests have been with early human ancestors for 245,000 years, causing problems long before the invention of beds. Lindsay Miles, an entomologist...

Manu Prakash is many things—biologist, engineer, inventor, philosopher—but what he isn’t is conventional. Following his instincts has led Manu to his most ambitious project yet: mapping the whole tree...

A mysterious disease called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) has been appearing in emergency rooms for about a decade. The disease has caused otherwise healthy children to lose the ability to move their a...

It’s a precarious time for science in the United States. Federal funding is being slashed, career scientists are being laid off, and researchers are considering leaving to work abroad. On top of that,...

South American cane toads were brought to Australia in 1935 to help eradicate native beetles that were destroying sugar cane crops. The toads didn’t care much for the beetles, but they did spread acro...

Birding is a hobby that attracts a very particular group of people: the kind who get up at sunrise, go into the woods, and wait for hours for a little tiny feathered friend to fly past. Author and ill...

As a young plant scientist, Joanne Chory shook up the research establishment with her unconventional approach to figuring out how plants work. Her methods and success changed the field, and led her to...

Grant funding by the National Science Foundation has been cut by more than half this year, bringing the foundation’s science funding to its lowest level in decades. Katrina Miller, who covers science...

At the end of April, air traffic control radar surveillance and radio communication systems at Newark Liberty International Airport went dark for over a minute. A week and half later, radar went down...

At the beginning of May, the National Institutes of Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a plan to develop a universal vaccine platform. Think: a single shot for flu...

Betül Kaçar started her scientific career as a biochemist, working on an enzyme found in zebrafish. But then she found her calling: investigating some of the hardest questions in evolutionary biology...

The “Mission: Impossible” franchise is known for its big stunts, and the newest film is no exception. Producer Kathleen Davis talks to the film’s stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, about the science be...

Climate scientist Jagadish Shukla grew up in a small village in rural India, where people starved if the monsoon season didn’t bring rain. To help his village, he set out to become a scientist and dis...

In recent years, digital touchscreens have replaced many of the buttons and knobs that control various functions in cars. But when Host Ira Flatow went shopping for a new car, he noticed that physical...

Tomatoes come in all kinds of colors, sizes, and flavors. But what’s going on at the genetic level? What makes a tomato red or yellow? Tiny or giant?Researchers are mapping the genomes of 22 varieties...