Science

NASA’s quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft made its second flight on Friday, kicking off a series of dozens of test flights in 2026.  Although the flight duration was abbreviated due to a technical issue, the team was able to collect information that will inform future tests.  “Despite the early landing, this is a good day...

Molly O’Shea has been practicing pediatrics for 33 years. “I’ve seen it all,” she says. Her career spans the introduction of numerous vaccines, a decline in infectious diseases — and a troubling rise in vaccine hesitancy.When, in January, the...

Real-life space exploration and big-screen science fiction will converge on Friday. As NASA prepares to launch Artemis II, the first crewed mission under the agency’s Artemis program and another step toward sending the first astronauts – Americans – to...

A landmark archaeological site in Chile may be thousands of years younger than originally thought, a new study claims. If validated, the finding would upend a key piece of evidence that humans reached South America about 14,500 years ago...

At first glance, Harvard Forest seems like an ordinary woodland. Oak trees shade the terrain among small shrubs and other trees, mostly maple, birch and beech. Fallen leaves coat the ground below. What makes this 1,600-hectare patch of land...

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings published Wednesday in the journal Icarus.The...

Sharks off the coast of the Bahamas are getting into drugs like cocaine, caffeine and painkillers — or rather, drugs are getting into them. The contaminated blood of species including nurse sharks and Caribbean reef sharks reveals the damage...

Platypuses just got weirder.As if a mammal that lays eggs, senses electricity with its bill and fluoresces isn’t enough of a headscratcher, now it appears platypuses also share a feature with birds. Tiny pigment-filled packets in the mammals’ hair...

In one of the biggest surprises of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders, with few of the smooth patches that earlier observations from Earth-based instruments had...

The data your smartwatch already collects could soon help flag an early warning sign for type 2 diabetes.Hidden in the patterns of heart rate, sleep and daily activity captured by everyday wearables are subtle clues that, when combined with...