Chemistry
‘Flavorama’ guides readers through the complex landscape of flavor
In her new book, Arielle Johnson, former resident scientist at the restaurant Noma, explains how to think like a scientist in the kitchen.
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Cover Story
A new approach to fighting wildfires combines local knowledge and AI
Land managers in the western United States are using potential operational delineations, or PODS, to prepare for — and take advantage of — wildfires.
Reviews & Previews
Science Visualized
Health & Medicine
Here’s what distorted faces can look like to people with prosopometamorphopsia
A patient with an unusual variation of the condition helped researchers visualize the demonic distortions he sees when looking at human faces.
Notebook
Genetics
Here’s why some pigeons do backflips
Meet the scientist homing in on the genes involved in making parlor roller pigeons do backward somersaults.
Features
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Geneticist Krystal Tsosie advocates for Indigenous data sovereignty
A member of the Navajo Nation, she believes Indigenous geneticists have a big role to play in protecting and studying their own data.
More Stories from the April 20, 2024 issue
- Health & Medicine
Don’t use unsterilized tap water to rinse your sinuses. It may carry brain-eating amoebas
Two new studies document rare cases in which people who rinsed sinuses with unsterilized tap got infected with brain-eating amoebas.
- Paleontology
An extinct sofa-sized turtle may have lived alongside humans
Peltocephalus maturin was one of the biggest turtles ever, but unlike similarly sized prehistoric freshwater turtles, it lived thousands of years ago.
- Humans
These are the chemicals that give teens pungent body odor
Steroids and high levels of carboxylic acids in teenagers’ body odor give off a mix of pleasant and acrid scents.
- Earth
Climate change is changing how we keep time
Polar ice sheets are melting faster, slowing Earth’s spin. That is changing how we synchronize our clocks to tell time.
- Physics
A teeny device can measure subtle shifts in Earth’s gravitational field
No bigger than a grain of rice, the heart of the instrument is the latest entrant in the quest to build ever tinier gravity-measuring devices.
- Archaeology
Human brains found at archaeological sites are surprisingly well-preserved
Analyzing a new archive of 4,400 human brains cited in the archaeological record reveals the organ’s unique chemistry might prevent decay.
- Space
How a sugar acid crucial for life could have formed in interstellar clouds
Computer calculations and lab experiments have revealed a possible mechanism for the creation of glyceric acid, which has been seen in meteorites.
- Animals
American bullfrogs may be threatening a rare frog species in Brazil
A search for environmental DNA from critically endangered Pithecopus rusticus frogs turned up DNA from invasive American bullfrogs instead.
- Animals
By fluttering its wings, this bird uses body language to tell its mate ‘after you’
New observations suggest that Japanese tits gesture to communicate complex messages — a rare ability in the animal kingdom and a first seen in birds.
- Ecosystems
Flowers may be big antennas for bees’ electrical signals
The finding suggests a way for plants to share information about nearby pollinators and communicate when to trigger nectar production.
- Science & Society
Not all cultures value happiness over other aspects of well-being
Nordic countries topped the 2024 world happiness rankings. But culture dictates how people respond to surveys of happiness, a researcher argues.
- Artificial Intelligence
AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game
New research used the game Overcooked to show how offline reinforcement learning algorithms could teach bots to collaborate with — or manipulate — us.
- Health & Medicine
50 years ago, margarine’s ‘healthy’ reputation began to melt away
In the 1970s, scientists began to suspect that margarine was bad for heart health. A key component, artificial trans fat, was a major factor.
