Meghan Rosen is a staff writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with an emphasis in biotechnology from the University of
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the man of death. Although this does not sound like a good moniker, it is: Ramakrishnan is one of the world’s most eminent scientists in the fields of structural biology and
People in the United States are in the midst of an ongoing opioid epidemic and a wave of mental health problems. So funding and staff cuts to a federal agency that supports mental
Conversational AI chatbots are making climate misinformation sound more credible, making it harder to distinguish falsehoods from real science. In response, climate experts are using some of the same tools to detect fake
Scene: A small patrol boat cruises through the water, just offshore of an island somewhere in the Caribbean. Cue the pounding drums, movie-trailer speak for danger approaching. Enter: Spinosaurus. Three large spiny sails
Pseudoscience Lydia Kang and Nate PedersenWorkman Publishing Company, $25 Have you ever taken a personality test seriously? Or maybe you’ve wondered if you could freeze yourself in liquid nitrogen to help revitalize your body
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters”—the
This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency. This
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Jon Dale’s love affair with birds began when he was about 10 and traded his BB gun for a
The first bat-wearable microphone is helping biologists study the bats’ good safety record at avoiding collisions in rush hour air. On summer evenings, in around a minute, some 2,000 greater mouse-tailed bats can
