Brace yourselves, Midwesterners: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you. Two broods of periodical cicadas—Brood XIX, which is on a 13-year cycle, and Brood XIII, on a 17-year cycle—have started to emerge together across the Midwest and …

It’s 2024—we know that cigarettes are bad for you. But scientists are still uncovering new and troubling ways that smoking changes you from the inside out. Today in Nature, a new study from the Institut Pasteur in Paris reports that smoking has a lingering effect on the immune system that …

Seemingly everyone has come down with at least one bout of illness this winter: sniffles that theoretically pass as “just some bug” if you don’t test for Covid. But there’s a solid chance, with or without a test, that those sniffles were Covid after all. We’re in the midst of …

Don’t let their fluff fool you: Your cat was built for murder. Felines, no matter how chonky, eepy, or boopable, are remarkably adaptable obligate carnivores, down to eat just about anything that fits in their mouth. Well-intentioned (or … threatening?) gifts of dead birds, rats, and lizards are familiar to …

Digital health company Celero Systems is developing an electronic pill that can measure heart rate, breathing rate, and core temperature—from inside the human stomach. As a first step, the company envisions people with ongoing conditions using the digital capsule to monitor their vital signs at home. But in the future, …

Millions of people over the age of 65 likely have mild cognitive impairment, or MCI—minor problems with memory or decisionmaking that can, over time, turn into dementia. But a pair of recent studies both concluded that 92 percent of people experiencing MCI in the United States are not getting diagnosed …

Thanks to some genetic tricks, plants can now speak in color. A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside hacked the natural stress response system in Arabidopsis thaliana, a small white-flowered plant from the mustard family that serves as a common model organism in plant biology labs. When …

Today, an international team of researchers shared an extraordinarily detailed atlas of human brain cells, mapping its staggering diversity of neurons. The atlas was published as part of a massive package of 21 papers in the journal Science, each taking complementary approaches to the same overarching questions: What cell types …

Over the weekend, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 58 (SB 58), nixing the state’s attempt to become one of a handful that are loosening restrictions on plant-based hallucinogens. The legislation was an effort to increase access to psychedelic therapy and remove penalties for people seeking these drugs. The …

You can 3D-print nearly anything: rockets, mouse ovaries, and for some reason, lamps made of orange peels. Now, scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, have printed living neural networks composed of rat brain cells that seem to mature and communicate like real brains do. Researchers want to create mini-brains …