In real life, laws are broken all the time. Besides your everyday criminals, there are scammers and fraudsters, politicians and mobsters, corporations and nations that regard laws as suggestions rather than restrictions. It’s not that way in physics. For centuries, physicists have been identifying laws of nature that are invariably unbreakable. Those laws govern matter, … Read more
In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 10 percent of children die before they turn 5 years old (SN: 8/3/22); in 2022 alone, around 2.8 million young children died in the entire region. Most are dying from pneumonia, diarrhea or malaria — diseases that can be treated with antibiotics. But prescribing antibiotics to all children … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The masses of neutrinos are less than a millionth that of the next lightest particle, the electron, but no one … Read more
Quantum entanglement has made its way to the top. Scientists have measured the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement in top quarks, the heaviest fundamental subatomic particles known. It’s the first detection of entanglement between pairs of quarks — a class of subatomic particles that make up larger particles, including protons and neutrons. Particles that are … Read more
When the virus that causes mpox jumped onto the international stage in 2022, countries around the world, including the United States, turned to vaccines targeting the closely related smallpox virus to curb its spread. Yet it wasn’t until 2024 that Africa, the continent where the virus emerged and first began spreading among people, received its … Read more
For the first time, a quantum computer has improved its results by repeatedly fixing its own mistakes midcalculation with a technique called quantum error correction. Scientists have long known that quantum computers need error correction to meet their potential to solve problems that stump standard, “classical” computers (SN: 6/22/20). Quantum computers calculate with quantum bits, or qubits, which … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? This is partly because it can be difficult to collect data on the number of people using safely managed … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The distribution of the new vaccines comes just before a program that temporarily pays for vaccines for the uninsured … Read more
Even the microwave oven in your kitchen is not immune to bacteria. The radiant environment inside a microwave oven can seem inhospitable to germs. But swabs from microwave ovens in several different areas identified more than 100 bacterial species, researchers report Aug. 7 in Frontiers in Microbiology. This is the first time scientists have documented … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The extreme heat and rain are scary enough on their own, and it’s getting hotter with climate change. But … Read more