Tag Archives: Research

Kinnon MacKinnon, a Canadian researcher, was only faintly surprised this spring when the website for an upcoming conference did not list his talk alongside the dozens of others. He was slated to discuss one of the most fraught topics in medicine: patients who transition to a different gender but later …

Today, few critters are as abundant as cicadas. Thousands of different cicada species are found throughout the world, and some even periodically emerge by the trillions. But the prehistoric world was not crawling with periodical swarms. The cicadas of the late Jurassic Period — which had bulkier bodies than today’s …

Leon N. Cooper, a Nobel-winning physicist who helped unlock the secret of how some materials can convey electricity without resistance, a phenomenon called superconductivity, and who did pioneering work in understanding how memory and the brain work, died on Wednesday at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 94. His …

Last month was the second-hottest September ever recorded; it came after the world’s warmest summer ever, in a year that is on track to be the most searing in recorded history. There’s only so much the human body can take. Heat killed 60,000 people in Europe alone in 2022, and …

Some 1,350 light-years from Earth, astronomers detected strange pairs of unexplained objects orbiting in the Orion Nebula. Since then, about 12 months ago, other scientists have proposed a new potential explanation for these apparitions, while other researchers wonder whether they exist at all. “There’s a bit less confidence they exist,” …

More than 80 American Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics have signed an open letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “This is the most consequential presidential election in a long time, perhaps ever, for the future of science and the United States,” reads the letter, …

Wildfires aren’t just tearing through larger swaths of the American West. They’re spreading more quickly, too. A team of researchers looked at NASA satellite data on 60,000 wildfires in the contiguous United States between 2001 and 2020. After classifying each blaze by the most it grew in a single day, …

Philip G. Zimbardo, a towering figure in social psychology who explored how good people turn evil in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which devolved into chaos after college students acting as guards started abusing other students acting as prisoners, died on Oct. 14 at his home in San Francisco. He …

The concept is simple and alluring: There are special regions around the world — called blue zones — where people regularly remain vibrant and active into their 90s and 100s, thanks to a simple set of behaviors that anyone can follow. It’s sensible enough to sound convincing, and ambiguous enough …

In January 2023, scientists attached tracking devices to eight grey plovers on the coast of the Wadden Sea off the Netherlands. The hope was to learn more about the birds’ yearly migration to breeding grounds in the Arctic. And all was going well until late May, when one of the …