Science News

Science News is a bi-weekly magazine in the United States that focuses on brief articles discussing the latest advancements in science and technology, often sourced from up-to-date scientific journals. This publication has been in circulation since 1922 and is produced by the Society for Science & the Public, a non-profit organization established by E. W. Scripps in 1920. Edwin Slosson, an American chemist, was the magazine's inaugural editor. Originally named Science News Letter from 1922 until 1966, the magazine rebranded to Science News starting with its March 12, 1966 issue (volume 89, number 11).

National, Consumer

English

Magazine

Outlet metrics

Domain Authority

Ranking

Global

#69322

United States

#23554

Computers Electronics and Technology/Computers Electronics and Technology

#608

Traffic sources

Monthly visitors

Articles

Skyborne specks of life may influence rainfall patterns

3 days ago | sciencenews.org | Nikk Ogasa

Sprinklings of life appear key to the recipe for rain. Lofted flecks of organic material like bacteria, pollen and fungal spores play a profound role in regulating rainfall patterns, a new study suggests. These bioparticles can make up a major portion of all the particles that can seed rain in the sky, and their levels fluctuate in a daily cycle, researchers report May 5 in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.
Chimp chatter is a lot more like human language than previously thought

5 days ago | sciencenews.org | Jake Buehler

Grunts, barks, screams and pants ring through Taï National Park in Cȏte d’Ivoire. Chimpanzees there combine these different calls like linguistic Legos to relay complex meanings when communicating, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Chimps can combine and flexibly rearrange pairs of sounds to convey different ideas or meanings, an ability that investigators have not documented in other nonhuman animals.
Neandertals may have hunted in horse-trapping teams 200,000 years ago

5 days ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Neandertals formed sophisticated hunting parties that drove wild horses into fatal traps around 200,000 years ago. At Germany’s Schöningen site, wooden spears, double-pointed sticks, stone artifacts and butchered remains of more than 50 horses of various ages are some 100,000 years younger than previously thought, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Excavations of this material, now linked to a time when Neandertals inhabited Europe, occurred in the 1990s along an ancient lakeshore.
How to fight Lyme may lie in the biology of its disease-causing bacteria

6 days ago | sciencenews.org | Leah Rosenbaum

Not all cell walls are created equal. Take the peculiar makeup of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium’s cell wall. It might play a role in lingering symptoms of Lyme disease — the most common tick-borne infection in the United States. That makeup might also be key to developing new treatments for the disease, researchers report in two studies published April 23 in Science Translational Medicine.
Putrid plants can reek of hot rotting flesh with one evolutionary trick

6 days ago | sciencenews.org | Tina Saey

Some plants stink of rotting meat or dung, which helps them attract flies for pollination. How plants make the carrion stench, which is usually produced by bacteria feasting on decaying corpses, has been a mystery until now. Several types of plants have independently evolved to make the fetid odor thanks to a few tweaks in one gene, researchers report May 8 in Science.
$1.8 billion in NIH grant cuts hit minority health research the hardest

6 days ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

The headlines keep coming: Another federal grant funding medical research terminated. Another lab devoted to mental health losing its funding. Another clinical trial stopped. It’s all part of actions the Trump administration says are needed to make government more efficient or to eliminate funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Opponents say the cuts undermine crucial medical research, gut careers and damage U.S. leadership in science.
Teens who want to quit vaping have another medication option

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Aimee Cunningham

Many teens who vape want to quit. A recent clinical trial suggests that a drug used to stop smoking can help. In the last four weeks of a 12-week trial, 51 percent of the 88 teens and young adults taking the drug varenicline, which was paired with counseling and text messaging support, abstained from vaping completely, researchers report April 23 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That’s compared with only 14 percent of the 87 receiving the same support but taking a placebo drug.
Do cold-water plunges really speed post-workout muscle recovery?

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Laura Sanders

Post-workout cold plunges may be having a moment, but a new study dunks on the practice. After a tough workout, muscle recovery was no better in women who immersed themselves in chilly water than in women who didn’t. No recovery benefits came from a hot soak, either. The decidedly tepid results appear May 7 in PLOS One. Thirty women completed five sets of 20 drop-jumps — grueling exercises that require a drop from a thigh-high box followed immediately by a powerful jump on the ground.
Before altering the air, microbes oxygenated large swaths of the sea

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Nikk Ogasa

Ancient oxygen-making microbes may have oxygenated large swaths of Earth’s seafloor hundreds of millions of years before the element filled the atmosphere. Geochemical analysis of sediments deposited roughly 2.6 billion years ago reveals that pulses of oxygen may have swept through large regions of the ocean, researchers report April 26 in Nature Geoscience.
British tin might have fueled the rise of some Bronze Age civilizations

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Bruce Bower

Where Bronze Age civilizations got large amounts of tin, a scarce metal, to mix with copper into the era’s namesake gold-colored metal has long puzzled archaeologists. A big part of the answer lies in Cornwall and Devon, two counties in southwestern England, a new study concludes. Farming communities began mining large tin ore deposits there around 4,200 years ago, say archaeometallurgist Alan Williams of Durham University in England and his colleagues.