As someone who was born deaf, I’m concerned about the latest application of a gene-editing tool called CRISPR 2.0. And I’m not alone. In June, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard and MIT announced that, using mice, they figured out how to use the technology to temporarily “correct” a mutation in the TMC1 gene, which […]
This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as “The Ecology of Dumb.” We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most. As you get closer to Earth’s poles, seasonal swings in temperature and vegetation get increasingly drastic. In many places, snowy winter wastelands […]
For the month of April, the canals of Venice were empty. Gondolas and vaporettos were moored, foreign tourists were sequestered in their home countries and local Italians were in lockdown. As a result, the sediment that had always floated in the canals finally settled to the bottom, revealing alien visitors. Not far from San Marco […]
Getting old means fighting a war you’ll never win. Our bodies already battle for us every day, against bacteria and viruses, mutant cells, harmful chemicals and the slow rush of time itself. But as we age, our bodies begin to slow down — all the way down to the level of the cell. This slowdown […]
Remnants of an ancient water ocean are buried beneath the icy crust of dwarf planet Ceres — or, at least, lingering pockets of one. That’s the tantalizing find presented August 10 by scientists working on NASA’s Dawn mission. Their research was laid out in a series of papers published in Nature. By far, Ceres is […]
In 2007, a group of researchers reported a startling discovery: They had created sperm-like cells out of stem cells taken from the bone marrow of human men. Two years later, however, the study was retracted due to charges of plagiarism. Thirteen years later, the ability to create functional human sperm out of stem cells remains […]
This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as “One in a Million.” We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most. For 2-year-old Farida and her family, the trip to Egypt was a pleasant prelude to what would turn into a hard few months. […]
This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as “Sound Off.” We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most. Six years ago, three Volvo engineers sat on a forest floor in western Sweden, picking twigs off the ground and snapping them in half. “We […]
In the race to find a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, some contenders come from classic development methods. Others would be the first of their kind.
When it comes to infectious diseases, our bodies can only defend themselves if they’re able to discriminate between the “self” and the “nonself”. And we’re not talking about philosophy here — in immunology, the terms are used to differentiate our own cells versus foreign materials. That means to attack a virus like COVID-19, our immune […]
Is there anything better than cozying up with a great new read on a brisk autumn day? Fall into the day in the life of an astronaut, wartime science or the ever-changing brain.
This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as “Robot Scientists Are Coming.” We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most. In the beginning there was Adam. We’re not talking about the first human, but rather the first machine to fully automate the scientific […]
This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as “The Mourning Mind” We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most. It was a crisp night in June, the sky bright from the light of the full moon. I stopped at a gas station to […]
Supermassive black holes are among the most exciting and puzzling objects in the universe. These are the giant, massive bodies that sit at the heart of most, perhaps all, galaxies. Indeed, they may be the seeds from which all galaxies grow. Supermassive black holes are at least a hundred thousand times the mass of our […]
Of all frightening ways that the SARS-COV-2 virus affects the body, one of the more insidious is the effect of COVID-19 on the brain. It is now clear that many patients suffering from COVID-19 exhibit neurological symptoms, from loss of smell, to delirium, to an increased risk of stroke. There are also longer-lasting consequences for the […]