Tag Archives: science

Lawrence Faucette, the 58-year-old patient with terminal heart disease who was the second person to receive a genetically engineered pig heart, died on October 30, according to a statement from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the transplant was performed. Faucette received the transplant on September 20 …

This Halloween, when you grab a candy bar, pay attention to the wrapper. In the United States, a "nutrition facts" label has been required for all packaged foods since 1994, giving the serving size and the amount of sugar, protein, fat, and sodium the food contains. But the most interesting …

In 2010, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker from Mexico arrived at a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana unknowingly carrying a deadly virus. His symptoms were mild at first: fatigue, shoulder pain, and numbness in one of his hands. As his condition worsened, he was admitted to a hospital in New Orleans. There, …

Feline researchers have long believed that purring is produced by voluntary muscle contractions, but a new report indicates that this vibration in the larynx of cats may be explained by the myoelastic aerodynamic theory of phonation. Studies on the complex action that produces a unique vibration in the larynx of …

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 …

Tolullah Oni has a challenge for you. Next time you’re in a city—especially one you don’t know well—go for a long run, bike ride, or walk. See if you can tell when you enter an affluent neighborhood. You should, she says, be able to guess. “Suddenly it’s a couple of …

Amber Pearson has had a severe form of obsessive compulsive disorder since she was in high school. She would wash her hands so much they became raw and bled. Her bedtime routine easily took 45 minutes because it involved checking that all the doors and windows were closed and the …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Algorithms have become ubiquitous. They optimize our commutes, process payments, and coordinate the flow of internet traffic. It seems that for every problem that can be articulated in precise mathematical terms, there’s an algorithm that can solve it, at least …

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Avian flu has reached the Antarctic, raising concerns for isolated populations of penguins and seals that have never been exposed to the deadly H5N1 virus before. The full impact of the virus’s arrival is not yet …

The world relies on electromagnetic waves for communications: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, even radio waves. But suppose you want to prevent a device from communicating—or interfering—with the rest of the world. You can't block EM waves, but you can cancel them by surrounding the device with an electrically conducting material. We …