cookies to track usage and preferences."
data-cookieaccepttext="I UNDERSTAND"
data-cookiedeclinetext="Disable Cookies"
data-cookiepolicytext="Privacy Policy">
Katherine Flegal was a scientist who found herself crunching numbers for the government, until one day her analyses set off a firestorm. What does she make of her decades as a woman in public health research?
Latest therapies control the inflammatory disease for many but not all. Scientists are investigating the roots of the variability and what to do about it.
Scientists find that a small amount of animal products could have a place in our diets without wreaking environmental havoc. But it’s far less than what we consume today, and only if farmed in just the right way.
A few rare viruses can reach the fetus when pregnant women are infected, with tragic result. As explored in this Q&A, researchers are figuring out how the placenta acts as protector and how some pathogens slip through.
How do trees find their sense of direction as they grow? Researchers are getting to the root — and the branches — of how the grandest of plants develop.
States of mind that the legal system cares about — memory, responsibility and mental maturity — have long been difficult to describe objectively, but neuroscientists are starting to detect patterns. Coming soon to a courtroom near you?
VIDEO: Cities have recently experienced extreme heat waves, causing preventable illness and death. How can we protect people from dangerous heat while also reducing carbon emissions?
It depends on what you mean by a wellness program. Offerings by companies are all over the map, but most are skimpy and scattershot. It takes more than that to boost employees’ health or a company’s bottom line.
VIDEO: Economic issues were front and center at the most recent global climate summit. Join Tobias Adrian of the International Monetary Fund and Shuang Liu of the World Resources Institute to take stock of the investments needed to prevent future climate disasters.
Retirement is a time for spending, not saving. And yet many people hold on to their wealth. Understanding why, and where that money ends up, is of increasing importance as the US population ages.
In the US, people charged with a crime usually need to post a large cash bond to be released before trial — a system used barely anywhere else in the world. This doesn’t enhance public safety and causes great hardship to defendants and families. There’s a better way, researchers say.
Ultrasound isn’t just for images. Sonogenetics and other promising technologies let researchers use focused sound waves to control genes and entire cells deep in the tissues of living animals, without surgery.
Historically, the road to reform has often begun with protesters taking to the streets. A sociologist and a political scientist take stock of whether today’s activism will lead to actual change.
Scientists are working at breakneck speed to develop inexpensive tools that take only minutes to tell if someone is infected — a feat that could pave the way for a safer return to normalcy
Marketed to meat lovers, plant-based burgers like Impossible and Beyond claim to taste like the real thing and to have far lighter environmental footprints. Here’s what the numbers have to say.
The meaning of the cryptic text has eluded scholars for centuries. Their latest efforts include computational analyses seeking new insights into the medieval enigma.
Epidemics of forest-felling diseases are on the rise thanks to globetrotting pathogens that slip through even the best defenses. To prevent further losses, scientists are turning to high-tech surveillance and detection, even canine noses.
Foods and beverages containing cannabis are popular, but probing their effects is difficult. Scientists are scouring existing studies and knowledge from nutrition research to learn how these products interact with the body.
In Latin America, tens of millions of people live in territories that are governed by outlaws — from powerful drug cartels to crime syndicates. What can be done to restore legitimate law and order?
Carnivorous plants fascinate as much now as when their gruesome diet was first discovered. Molecular biology is helping botanists trace the origins of their predatory ways.
Innovative thinking has done away with problems that long dogged the electric devices — and both scientists and environmentalists are excited about the possibilities
The disorder has several different causes, researchers are learning. That finding opens the door for personalized therapies — and perhaps even effective drugs.
Millions of years of coevolution have given the insects a bag of tricks to escape their predators — from signal-jamming and decoys to acoustic camouflage
PODCAST: They started out so small, one could fit on the palm of your hand, but to make groundbreaking discoveries, physicists had to think really big — as in, vast machines with the power and capacity to reveal the tiniest building blocks of our universe (Season 2/Episode 5)
From monkeys washing potatoes to cockatoos raiding trash cans, socially spread behaviors allow creatures to adapt more rapidly to changing environments than conventional evolution would allow. But the traits are also more easily lost.
COMIC: The feisty orange-black butterfly uses a toolbox of biological tricks to find its way down to Mexico for winter and flap north again in spring. Here’s how scientists figured out those tricks — and what they don’t yet understand.
Loud road and air traffic has been linked to a greater risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes. Scientists are uncovering new details about how what you hear stresses the cardiovascular system.
COMIC: Bite marks, shoe prints, crime-scene fibers: Matches to suspects are often far shakier than courtroom experts claim. Better statistical methods — among them, a little beast known as the “likelihood ratio” — can cut down on wrong convictions.
Fossilized leaves and pollen are revealing the evolutionary past of New World tropical forests. The findings are helping to reshape predictions of what might happen to these ecosystems as the climate changes.
OPINION: Children around the world were out of school for months, with big impacts on learning, well-being and the economy. How do we avoid a ‘generational catastrophe’?
Moneyball-like statistical tools have already changed baseball, basketball and football. But bringing such methods to the ice has proved challenging. That might soon be changing.
Social insects disobey evolutionary principles that say creatures invest in body maintenance or reproduction — not both. Scientists want to know how the creatures do it.
Urban activities — think construction, transportation, heating, cooling and more — are major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions. Today, a growing number of cities are striving to slash their emission to net zero — here’s what they need to do.
By engineering mutations into fruit flies, scientists reconstructed how the butterflies may have evolved resistance to the toxins found in milkweed, allowing their caterpillars to feast on the plant
Some scientists propose that in the beginning, geochemistry gave way to biochemistry — with no genetic material necessary. Only later did RNA and DNA appear.
PODCAST: Not that long ago, scientists found evidence that our Sun wasn’t unique — other stars have their own orbiting bodies. It was a discovery centuries in the making. What does this mean for Earth today and our place in the universe? (Season 2/Episode 2)
It’s easy to get, but difficult to study or treat. Scientists are making progress against the virus thanks to an infusion of cash and a new way of culturing it in the lab.
Researchers are developing brain-computer interfaces that would enable communication for people with locked-in syndrome and other conditions that render them unable to speak
The idea of a multiverse — multiple realms of space differing in basic properties of physics — bugs some scientists. Others find it a real possibility that should not be ignored.
No one knows exactly how the nocturnal hunters manage their whisper-soft flight, yet it is inspiring the design of quieter airplanes, fans and wind turbines
The scientific literature is riddled with bad charts and graphs, leading to misunderstanding and worse. Avoiding design missteps can improve understanding of research.
The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI. It’s taking baby steps toward reasoning like humans and might one day take the wheel in self-driving cars.
VIDEO: Many cellular processes are guided by fluctuations of molecules, from circadian clocks to the feat of precisely dividing into two daughter cells
What helps some people diagnosed with cancer, heart disease or diabetes stay relatively happy and healthy, while others are devastated? Psychologist Vicki Helgeson explains the traits and mindsets that can make the difference.
It took a long time to figure out how attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder presents in girls and women and the problems it can create. A pioneering study helped change that, but the condition is still often missed.
Machines might better understand our commands if they experienced our physical worlds, researchers say. That enhanced perception could sharpen their listening skills and improve performance.
For centuries, the wild delicacy grew only in Europe. But improved cultivation techniques have enabled the pricey, odorous fungus to be farmed in new landscapes.
A summary of “Update on Alzheimer’s Disease Therapy and Prevention Strategies” by W. Vallen Graham and coauthors, in the 2017 issue of the Annual Review of Medicine
Not all surgeons are equally skilled with a scalpel. Doctors are developing new ways to test — and improve — operating room performance.
Close X
This is not a paywall.
Knowable Magazine is free to read. But just because our articles are free to read doesn’t mean they are free to produce. If you value our trustworthy science journalism, please support it with a donation.
