Erin Wayman

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Erin Wayman

Reporters from across the United States flocked to eastern Tennessee in July 1925. In the small town of Dayton, biology teacher John Scopes went on trial for the crime of teaching human evolution. Among the journalists in the courtroom was Watson Davis, there on behalf of Science News-Letter, later rebranded as Science News.

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Erin Wayman

Barbara J. King remembers the first time she met Kanzi the bonobo. It was the late 1990s, and the ape was living in a research center in Georgia. King walked in and told Kanzi she had a present. A small, round object created a visible outline in the front pocket of her jeans. Kanzi picked up a board checkered with colorful symbols and pointed to the one meaning “egg” and then to “question.” An egg? No, not an egg. A ball.

Aug 23, 2024 | sciencenews.org | Erin Wayman |Meghan Rosen |Tina Saey |Alex Fox

Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet's changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? Oncologist Steven Rosenberg of the U.S. National Cancer Institute became intrigued by the body’s potential for fighting cancer in 1968 after encountering a patient whose tumors spontaneously disappeared, presumably due to the immune system. It took decades to go from that kernel of an idea to the new TIL therapy.

Feb 26, 2024 | sciencenews.org | Evelyn Lamb |Skyler Ware |Erin Wayman |Laura Sanders

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238.  “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a computer scientist at UCLA. “That’s probably the simplest pattern you can imagine.”  Yet for almost a century, mathematicians in the field of combinatorics have been puzzling out how to know whether an endless list of numbers contains such a sequence, called an arithmetic progression.

Feb 16, 2024 | snexplores.org | Madeline Reinsel |Emily Conover |Betsy Mason |Erin Wayman

arachnid: A group of invertebrate animals that includes spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks. Many have silk or venom glands. biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things. chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H2O.