Latest Stories

Pigeons seem to defy a century-old psychology law about how rewards and consequences help us learn

The toxin behind two outbreaks in seven months is hard to find—and just a handful of labs are equipped to look for it at all

A prolonged, intense heat wave will make temperatures feel as hot as 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the eastern U.S. this week

Training people to pay attention to the right visual cues nearly doubled how accurately they could spot AI-generated faces

A handful of start-up firms are testing therapies that target specific epigenetic markers to treat everything from high cholesterol to a rare muscular disorder

Inside the quest to rescue NASA’s aging Swift observatory

A field guide to the space rocks you might see streaking across the night sky

Our solar system is a celestial shooting gallery, chock-full of flying projectiles that one day could threaten Earth—so what can we do about it?

Key differences in the chemical structure of butter and margarine mean choosing one or the other has a big effect on your baking

Julie Elie has been studying zebra finch vocalizations for years. Now she has won the Coller-Dolittle Prize for progress toward a world where humans can talk to animals

The discovery of a completely new type of gravitational wave could reveal what happens near a black hole’s event horizon

This Silicon Valley–backed venture is unraveling the mangled remains of scrolls ruined by the C.E. 79 eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii