A clearer view of a changing world.
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Discoveries, methods and the people behind them.
Sequencing a genome costs less than a night in a hospital. Turning that information into better treatment has proved far harder than the price curve suggested.
The Daily Edition · 2 min read
A space telescope that sees in infrared, ground observatories with mirrors the size of buildings, and a survey that will photograph the whole southern sky every few nights. Each answers questions the last generation could only pose.
2 min read
Two approved antibodies slow decline modestly in early disease. Blood tests can detect the pathology. Neither is a cure, and the question of what the disease fundamentally is remains open.
2 min read
Models that reason step by step get more right. They also produce confident, well-structured arguments for wrong answers. Reliability, it turns out, is not the same as capability.
2 min read
An industry sells longevity. Science has a shorter, duller list: move, sleep, do not smoke, keep blood pressure down, stay connected. What the research actually supports, and what it does not.
2 min read
Ignition has happened. Net electricity has not. A guide to separating the physics results from the press releases.
In this illustrative scenario, a public-private consortium announced where it intends to build a plant meant to deliver fusion electricity to the grid in the 2030s.
Science
Some reefs regained coral cover while others did not, in this illustrative scenario, with heat exposure the strongest predictor.
Climate
Modern medicine can image every organ and sequence every gene, and millions of people still wait years for a name for what is wrong with them. The reasons are as much about how medicine is organized as about biology.
Health & Medicine
2 min read
The ocean stores more heat than the atmosphere, moves carbon on a scale no engineering project matches, and remains less mapped than the surface of Mars. What scientists are learning is changing how climate is understood.
2 min read
Between a result in a laboratory and a treatment in a clinic lie a decade, a billion dollars and a failure rate above ninety percent. Understanding the path explains why so many breakthroughs never arrive.
Health & Medicine
Something holds galaxies together that no instrument has detected directly. After half a century of searching, the leading candidates are being ruled out one by one, and that is progress.
Science
No telescope can photograph the surface of a planet around another star. Astronomers learn what those worlds are made of anyway, from the shadows they cast and the light they filter.
Science
From 2,300 transistors on the first microprocessor to more than a hundred billion on a modern system. The curve that defined computing, and the reasons it is bending.
The World in Numbers
The note an orchestra tunes to was fought over for two centuries, settled by an international conference in 1939 and written into a standard in 1955. Some orchestras still ignore it.
The Curiosity Page