Tag Archives: science

This August, government airplanes and helicopters have been dropping tiny parcels from the sky for raccoons to find. Each one is about the size of a ketchup packet and contains an oral rabies vaccine that coats the mouth of the animal that bites into it. The vaccine is the United …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely …

This story originally appeared in Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems, and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was published in collaboration with Earth Island Journal. The floatplane bobs at the dock, its wing tips leaking fuel. I try not to take …

This summer has been hot—one of the hottest on record—and it's probably just going to keep getting hotter. I feel like we are getting to the point where air-conditioning isn't just something nice to have, it's a necessity. There are several ways to cool things off, but the most common …

In February, a dermatologist in New York City contacted the state’s health department about two female patients, ages 28 and 47, who were not related but suffered from the same troubling problem. They had ringworm, a scaly, crusty, disfiguring rash covering large portions of their bodies. Ringworm sounds like a …

Paralysis had robbed the two women of their ability to speak. For one, the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease that affects the motor neurons. The other had suffered a stroke in her brain stem. Though they can’t enunciate clearly, they remember how to formulate words. Now, …

Today, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 am Eastern time, …

Canadian firefighter Scott Rennick knew this summer would be bad. It was May 2023 and Rennick was commanding one of British Columbia’s six incident management teams, or IMTs, specialized crews tasked with managing the most complex fires. His 18-person crew had just arrived in the northeast city of Fort Saint …

Doing surgery on the back of the eye is a little like laying new carpet: You must begin by moving the furniture. Separate the muscles that hold the eyeball inside its socket; make a delicate cut in the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane that covers the eye. Only then can the …

Stan Nicholas almost didn’t go through with getting a brain implant.  The Cleveland Clinic was seeking volunteers who had been disabled by stroke to undergo an experimental procedure meant to restore movement in their upper body. It would mean getting a thin wire placed in his cerebellum to electrically stimulate …