On some level, the human liver in the operating room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago was alive. Blood circulating through its tissues delivered oxygen and removed waste products, and the organ produced bile and proteins that are essential to the body. But the donor had died a day earlier, and the liver lay inside […]

The Department of Health and Human Services said on Monday that hospitals must obtain written informed consent from patients before they undergo sensitive examinations — like pelvis and prostate exams — especially if the patients will be under anesthesia. A New York Times investigation in 2020 found that hospitals, doctors and doctors in training sometimes […]

Here I am registered at Cambridge, and very nervous. First thing, I was told that I’ve done everything wrong. Chimps shouldn’t be named, they should be numbered. You can’t talk about their personalities. You can’t talk about them having brains capable of solving problems. And you certainly can’t talk about them having emotions. You cannot […]

With a head covered in rows of curved spines, ancient Selkirkia worms could easily be confused with the razor-toothed sandworms that inhabit the deserts of Arrakis in “Dune: Part Two.” During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, these weird worms — which lived inside long, cone-shaped tubes — were some of the […]

In the 19th century, when the German naturalist Ludwig Edinger performed the first anatomical studies of the bird brain and discovered the absence of a neocortex — the more evolutionarily nascent outer layer of the brain, responsible for complex cognition and creative problem-solving — he dismissed birds as little more than Cartesian puppets of reflex. […]

The Biden administration plans to spend up to $6 billion on new technologies to cut carbon dioxide emissions from heavy industries like steel, cement, chemicals and aluminum, which are all enormous contributors to global warming but which have so far been incredibly difficult to clean up. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday that her agency […]

Few parents would describe the smells emanating from their adolescent children as redolent of sandalwood. But one of the distinct components of teenage body odor is a compound that evokes that warm, woody fragrance, according to a small new study, which compared the scents of adolescents to those of infants and toddlers. Unfortunately, that’s just […]

The highest governing body in geology has upheld a contested vote by scientists against adding the Anthropocene, or human age, to the official timeline of Earth’s history. The vote, which a committee of around two dozen scholars held in February, brought an end to nearly 15 years of debate about whether to declare that our […]

Camera traps, which automatically snap photos of wild animals when they detect motion and body heat, have become key research tools for wildlife biologists. The new study is based on data from 102 different camera trapping projects in 21 countries. (Most were based in North America or Europe, but South America, Africa and Asia were […]

Kent Campbell, an instrumental figure in the global battle against malaria — most notably in Africa, where he led an innovative program providing bed nets to protect rural villagers from the mosquitoes carrying the disease — died on Feb. 20 in Oro Valley, Ariz., a suburb of Tucson. He was 80. His death, in a […]