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
Long dry spells can give a lethal fungal disease a lift. While California droughts can temporarily keep cases of valley fever — a sometimes deadly illness caused by Coccidioides fungi — relatively low, cases skyrocket when rain clouds move back in, researchers report in the October Lancet Regional Health — Americas. Valley fever is on … Read more
This video was supported by funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. TRANSCRIPT Maria Temming: In 2021, a historic heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest killing hundreds of people and fueling wildfires. Researchers later reported that human-caused climate change made this heat wave at least 150 times more likely. But how do scientists figure out … Read more
A lucky alignment of two sun-studying spacecraft may have finally solved a decades-old solar mystery. Data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter suggest that plasma waves known as Alfvén waves inject energy into the solar wind as it leaves the sun’s outer atmosphere, potentially explaining why the solar wind … Read more
A barrage of intense, wild swings in climate conditions may have fueled the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. A re-creation of how ancient sea surface temperatures, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and landmasses interacted revealed an Earth plagued by nearly decade-long stints of droughts, wildfires and flooding. Researchers knew that a spike in global temperatures … Read more
The biggest clash in cosmology might be inching closer to resolution, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists disagree over the universe’s expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. There are two main methods for measuring it — one based on exploding stars called supernovas and the other on the universe’s oldest light, the … 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
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
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
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