Doug Allan, a cameraman whose skill at capturing candid scenes of penguins, bears, walruses and other animals that populate the earth’s polar extremes — both above and below the ice — earned him a brace of awards and the unbounded admiration of the renowned nature documentarian David Attenborough, who worked with him on many films,…
The Trump administration is creating a new office that critics say could weaken the environmental oversight of oil drilling and seabed mining in territorial waters. The new agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, will be formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in an effort to…
Physicists have used a machine learning approach to reveal unexpected details about how particles interact in complex systems. Their work focuses on non-reciprocal forces, where one particle influences another differently than it is influenced in return. The findings, published in PNAS, come from a collaboration between experimental and theoretical physicists at Emory University. By combining…
For more than 25 years, researchers at Northwestern Medicine have been studying people age 80 and older known as “SuperAgers” to understand how some individuals maintain exceptional mental sharpness late in life. These individuals consistently perform on memory tests at levels similar to people at least 30 years younger, challenging the long-standing belief that cognitive…
Researchers at McGill University and the Douglas Institute have discovered that two distinct types of brain cells function differently in people with depression. The findings, published in Nature Genetics, offer important clues that could lead to new treatments designed to target these specific cells. They also provide a clearer understanding of depression, a condition that…
As public health officials declared the end of a sewage contamination emergency in the Potomac River last month, scientists feared the waterway was still in distress. More than 240 million gallons of human waste had poured into the river from a broken sewer main. Researchers went out in early March to sample the water, trying…
Changes in eyesight are one of the most common signs of aging. Sit in a dimly lit restaurant with someone over 60, and you will likely hear them say, “Hold on — let me pull out my cell phone. I need more light to read the menu!” But what if that gradual decline in vision…
Spending on new medical research by the National Institutes of Health has fallen roughly $1 billion behind the pace of years past, delaying thousands of scientific projects and raising concerns within the agency that it may struggle to pay out the money it was allotted by Congress. Instead of canceling grants en masse, as the…
Colorectal cancer is among the most common cancers in Western countries and remains a major cause of cancer-related deaths. While factors like age, diet, and lifestyle are known to influence risk, the exact triggers behind the disease are still not fully understood. In recent years, scientists have increasingly focused on the gut microbiome, the vast…
Two billion years after the cosmos banged into existence, a mysterious force known as dark energy began shoving space outward, causing the universe to balloon faster and faster and threatening to one day rip apart everything within it, from clusters of galaxies to particles inside atoms. Astronomers have taken on the behemoth task of figuring…
