There is little question that supplemental fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces decay. But at what cost? | Continue reading
The genomes of 13 remarkably preserved 4,000-year-old mummies from the Tarim Basin suggest they weren’t migrants who brought technology from the west, as previously supposed. | Continue reading
A genomic analysis of human remains from the Bronze Age provides insights into the origin of the Tarim Basin mummies from the Xinjiang region. | Continue reading
Mapping of the global potential of atmospheric water harvesting using solar energy shows that it could provide safely managed drinking water for a billion people worldwide based on climate suitability. | Continue reading
The mystery of COVID’s origins has reignited a contentious debate about potentially risky studies and the fuzzy terminology that describes them. | Continue reading
Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature. | Continue reading
How a win in the Supreme Court challenged a linchpin of the genetic-testing industry. | Continue reading
California recently experienced a rapid shift from multi-year drought to abundant rainfall. A large ensemble of climate model simulations suggests that the frequency of extreme wet-to-dry precipitation events will increase by 25% to 100% across California due to anthropogenic for … | Continue reading
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will loop past the never-before-explored ‘Trojan’ asteroids during a 12-year journey. | Continue reading
Analysis of 273 ancient horse genomes reveals that modern domestic horses originated in the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region. | Continue reading
President Jair Bolsonaro has approved a bill funnelling cash away from science and towards other areas of government, stranding research proposals and dashing hopes. | Continue reading
A novel study led by scientists in Lübeck, Germany, shows that SARS-CoV-2-infected brain endothelial cells undergo cell death due to the cleavage of NEMO by the viral protease Mpro, potentially causing cerebral COVID-19 and ‘long COVID’ symptoms. | Continue reading
Air pollution is a cause of disease for millions around the world and now more than ever urgent action is required to tackle the burden of its impacts. Doing so will not only improve both life expectancy and quality of life, but will also lead to a more just and sustainable world … | Continue reading
Companies are updating vaccines and testing them on people to prepare for whatever comes next in the pandemic. | Continue reading
Precise dating of wooden artefacts at a Norse settlement in Newfoundland establishes that the Norse were in the Americas in ad 1021. | Continue reading
An analysis of GPS pedestrian traces shows that (1) people increasingly deviate from the shortest path when the distance between origin and destination increases and that (2) chosen paths are statistically different when origin and destination are swapped. Ultimately, this can ex … | Continue reading
But decades-long mystery of how long the particles live persists. | Continue reading
The authors propose a new framework, deep evolutionary reinforcement learning, evolves agents with diverse morphologies to learn hard locomotion and manipulation tasks in complex environments, and reveals insights into relations between environmental physics, embodied intell … | Continue reading
Growth of wind and solar energy share demonstrates different dynamics between the initial phases of adoption as compared with the advanced stages. Cherp et al. study the growth dynamics of renewable energy and show that laggards may continue to struggle to achieve high growth rat … | Continue reading
Ship engines, underwater blasts, sonar and oil drilling are filling the seas with sound. Researchers are now trying to pin down the damage humanity’s growing acoustic footprint has on ocean life. | Continue reading
The earliest evidence that Stone Age hunter-gatherers chewed or smoked the plant have been discovered among the remains of an ancient fire. | Continue reading
For FRB 121102, 1,652 burst events are detected over 47 days, with a peak burst rate of 122 per hour, a bimodal burst rate energy distribution, and no periodicity or quasi-periodicity. | Continue reading
Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence. | Continue reading
People who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have a stronger immune response after being vaccinated than those who have never been infected. Scientists are trying to find out why. | Continue reading
Images can be made more accessible by choosing hues, shapes and textures carefully. | Continue reading
Tax heavy cars and shrink batteries to consolidate the gains from electrifying transport. | Continue reading
The possibility of a huge oil spill off the coast of Yemen, already in crisis, is increasingly likely. This study projects the likely spill extent and impacts to public health, food, water and air. | Continue reading
With societies phasing down the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), alternative environmentally-friendly refrigerants are required. Here the authors screen a large chemical database for replacements, performing simulations to show there are only a few candidate single-component flu … | Continue reading
When governments assume that people will panic, that exacerbates the pandemic. | Continue reading
Existing approaches to sharing of distributed medical data either provide only limited protection of patients’ privacy or sacrifice the accuracy of results. Here, the authors propose a federated analytics system, based on multiparty homomorphic encryption (MHE), to overcome these … | Continue reading
The authors develop a deep learning approach that enables an efficient search of the input space to find the best stimuli for modeled neurons. When tested, these stimuli are most effective at driving their matching cells in the brain. | Continue reading
Scientists around the world are working together to catalogue and map cells in the brain. What have these huge projects revealed about how it works? | Continue reading
An inexpensive type of portable filter efficiently screened SARS-CoV-2 and other disease-causing organisms from hospital air. | Continue reading
Focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) combined with deep-learning-based segmentation is used to produce three-dimensional reconstructions of complete cells and tissues, in which up to 35 different organelle classes are annotated. | Continue reading
Collaborations between AI researchers and China’s medical workers are helping to combat diseases such as diabetes and COVID-19. | Continue reading
The Chang’e-5 mission returned the first lunar samples since the 1970s, with bits of lava dated at two billion years old. | Continue reading
As pandemic restrictions ease, other respiratory viruses are returning in unexpected ways. | Continue reading
Nobel prize insiders and observers say timing and politics meant vaccine technology was an unlikely winner — but science’s most prestigious prize shouldn’t be far off. | Continue reading
Faculty members at the University of Tennessee Knoxville are demanding that nanotechnologist Anming Hu get his job back. | Continue reading
The rare example of a government research agency facing criminal charges after a natural disaster underlines the perils of communicating and managing risk. | Continue reading