Science

On a bleak stretch of the Colorado Desert in Southern California, a compact four-wheeled rover recently trundled about 16 miles (26 kilometers) with minimal intervention from the team of engineers trailing it. Called ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme...

Not long after a powerful earthquake rocked Japan, the whole country moved a few millimeters east. The cause, researchers report June 18 in Science, was a seismic wave that plunged to Earth’s core and back, causing faults to slip...

New fossil evidence is overturning a long-held assumption about how vertebrates first transitioned from water to land. The hatchlings of three different animals related to the earliest land-goers show that the animals did not go through an amphibian-like metamorphosis,...

Citations J.M. Nagata et al. Prospective associations between early adolescent problematic screen use, mental health, sleep, and substance use. American Journal of Preventative Medicine. Published online February 11, 2026. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2025.108248S. Nivins et al. Digital media, genetics, and risk for ADHD symptoms in children: A...

WASHINGTON — Microbiologists are used to looking at gross pictures and hearing scary statistics. So when a moderator of a session on emerging fungal infections at the ASM Microbe meeting uttered the words “somewhat terrifying,” it caught my attention....

From the icy expanse of the South Pole, John Della Costa, a researcher on the Background Imaging...

In May, the Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) marked its first anniversary with MIT Manufacturing Week, four...

A common houseplant hides a pattern that may reveal how some leaf veins form.The leaves of the Chinese money plant (Pilea peperomioides) display a geometric pattern called a Voronoi diagram, researchers report May 12 in Nature Communications. That pattern...

An international team of researchers has developed a novel fluorescent nanosensor powered by carbon nanotubes that is...

Earth’s oceans are heating up, but one patch in the North Atlantic has cooled by about 1 degree Celsius since the 19th century. Scientists now think they know why: The “cold blob” is the result of slowing ocean heat...