Science

December 17, 2024 4 min read Delicious Bacon Highlights Food That Enraptures Our Senses but Endangers Our Health Some foods, no matter how simply prepared, contain many substances linked to disease By Lydia Denworth My love of bacon is legendary in my family. When I was about five, I stood by the stove while my […]

Everyone has heard that it’s vital to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night, a recommendation repeated so often it has become gospel. Get anything less, and you are more likely to suffer from poor health in the short and long term — memory problems, metabolic issues, depression, dementia, heart disease, a weakened

December 17, 2024 3 min read Science-Based Tips for Making Your Christmas Tree Last O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, where’s your instruction manual? Here’s how to make the most of your Christmas tree By Meghan Bartels Elizabethsalleebauer/Getty Images Ah, December, the month when many people bring a little—or not-so-little—piece of the great outdoors inside in the

December 17, 2024 5 min read Silicon Valley Is Reviving the Discredited and Discriminatory Idea of ‘Race Science’ Scientific racism today must be seen and rejected for what it truly is—a hollow attempt to dress discrimination in the garb of science and reason By David Robert Grimes Family and race policy instruction in Nazi Germany,

December 17, 2024 3 min read Why Some Brains Don’t Rot and Other Wild Things We Learned about the Human Body in 2024 From periods of rapid aging in our 40s and 60s to ancient brains that don’t decompose, here are some of the year’s most intriguing stories about human biology By Tanya Lewis Bob_Bosewell/Getty

December 16, 2024 4 min read Why It’s a Bad Idea to Shoot at New Jersey ‘Mystery Drones’ Surging reports of strange drones in the skies over New Jersey and other parts of the northeast U.S. have spurred calls to shoot down the unidentified objects. But that’s a very bad idea By Lee Billings A

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Imagine a photograph of your great-grandparents, grandparents and parents side by side. You’d see a resemblance, but each generation would look distinct from its predecessors. This is the process of evolution in its simplest form: descent with modification.

Anthony Fauci became a household name during the COVID pandemic. But the genially stubborn infectious disease doctor, who spent decades helming one the U.S. government’s most important medical research institutes, had made his mark well before that. Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., as the grandson of Italian immigrants, Fauci became a physician who would

December 16, 2024 3 min read The 6 Most Hilarious Things We Learned about Animals in 2024 From a comb jelly with two butts to wing-slapping ants, this animal research made us laugh this year By Andrea Thompson Ken Griffiths/Alamy Stock Photo Science has the ability to inspire awe, to improve our lives—and, sometimes, to

Beer is best served cold, and it turns out that math can help with that. Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini of the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Brazil recently set out to formulate an equation to determine the optimal shape of a beer glass that will keep a beverage tastily chilled—in other words, he