Steve Sclafani, a graduate student working with Dr. Kurahashi Neilson at Drexel who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, and Mirco Hünnefeld, a graduate student at the Technical University Dortmund in Germany, spearheaded the analysis, taking advantage of advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. “We’re really doing a […]
All across the Milky Way, dying stars are gobbling up their planets. Even Earth is likely to perish this way about five billion years from now, when the sun expands and devours its innermost worlds. But the giant planet Halla, which closely orbits a star 520 light years from Earth, appears to have narrowly escaped […]
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who served as the federal government’s top infectious disease specialist for nearly 40 years and played a key role in steering the United States through the coronavirus pandemic, will join the faculty of Georgetown University in Washington next month. Dr. Fauci, 82, retired from the National Institutes of Health last year, […]
For a bloodthirsty, global health threat, the African malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, has surprisingly discriminating taste. It prefers feeding on humans to other animals, is more attracted to some people than others and even then appears to have a particular predilection for feet. “Despite being quite tiny, the African malaria mosquito has a very powerful […]
Ozempic and Wegovy have already changed the landscape for obesity in America — a breakthrough that has been described and debated so much in terms of cosmetic benefits and medical moral hazard that it can be easy to forget that obesity is among the largest risk factors for preventable death in the United States. Next-generation […]
In 1830, Henry De la Beche, an English paleontologist, composed a painting of “Duria Antiquior,” a vision of Mesozoic oceans. When picturing a long-necked marine reptile, he depicted its throat clamped between the jaws of a monstrous Ichthyosaurus. Almost two centuries have passed without direct evidence of the neck biting De la Beche imagined. But […]
Some 30 million years ago, a primitive bear roamed near a river in what is now North Dakota. A male, he probably looked like a raccoon and might have eaten like an otter. An inspection of the curious critter’s skeleton provides details of the animal’s brief, and likely painful, life and clues about the evolution […]
Enceladus — the sixth-largest of Saturn’s 146 moons — has a liquid ocean with a rocky floor under its bright, white and frosty surface. Ice volcanoes spew frozen grains of material into space, generating one of the many rings circling the planet. Now, a team of researchers has discovered that those icy grains contain phosphates. […]
The waters off New Zealand 25 million years ago were home to early baleen whales, megatooth sharks and human-size penguins. Now researchers are adding a bizarre dolphin to the mix that may have used tusklike teeth to thrash prey into submission. The dolphin’s nearly complete skull was collected in 1998, from a cliff side in […]
Doctors are generally held in high regard today, but Romans of the first century were skeptical, even scornful, of medical practitioners, many of whom ministered to ailments they did not understand. Poets especially ridiculed surgeons for being greedy, for taking sexual advantage of patients and, above all, for incompetence. In his “Natural History,” Pliny the […]
