Breakthroughs in medicine are exciting. They promise to alleviate human suffering, sometimes on global scales. But it takes years, even decades, for new drugs and therapies to go from research to your ...

Every Saturday we post a selection of our favorite science and technology articles from the week. With 2024 nearing its end, we dug through all those posts again to surface 25 stories worth revisiting ...

When human stem cells were discovered at the turn of the century, it sparked a frenzy. Scientists immediately dreamed of repairing damaged tissues due to aging or disease. A few decades later, their ...

“We exist, and life exists on Earth, because of 12 to 14 inches of topsoil. When that goes away, we go away,” said James Ehrlich, director of compassionate sustainability at Stanford University. It ...

Our hands are mirror images of each other. Unless you flip one hand around, they’ll never look the same. Scientists call this chirality, and the mirror-like property is fundamental to all life on ...

Despite the hype around AI in recent years, the technology’s disruptive impact has been fairly modest. Experts say that’s likely to change next year as AI agents force their way into all aspects of ...

This year, readers were again fascinated by stories about artificial intelligence. One algorithm learned to make short, playable video games from video footage; another cloned real people’s ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe—life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like?

Thousands of new genes are hidden inside the “dark matter” of our genome. Previously thought to be noise left over from evolution, a new study found that some of these tiny DNA snippets can make ...

Type text into AI image and video generators, and you’ll often see outputs of unusual, sometimes creepy, pictures. In a way, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding ...

Brain aging occurs in distinctive phases. Its trajectory could be hidden in our blood—paving the way for early diagnosis and intervention. A new study published in Nature Aging analyzed brain imaging ...

With a single shot, scientists protected pregnant mice from a deadly complication called pre-eclampsia. The shot, inspired by mRNA vaccines, contains mRNA instructions to make a protein that reverses ...