A close-up illustration of a translucent amber-colored rock with a DNA double helix held inside
Physics

Jurassic Park inspires a new way to store DNA data

Sometimes science fiction does inspire science research. À la Jurassic Park’s entombed mosquito, scientists have developed a method to store DNA in an amberlike material and still extract it easily hours later. This storage method is cheaper and faster than existing options, the researchers report in the June Journal of the American Chemical Society. If […]

The hands of a health care worker wearing gloves hold a vial and a swab that
Environment

Why mpox is a global health emergency — again

For the second time, the World Health Organization has declared that mpox, formerly called monkeypox, is a global health emergency. In 2022, global spread of the virus, which causes rashes, fevers, muscle aches and other symptoms, led to the first emergency declaration (SN: 7/22/22). That version of the virus, called clade II, is still causing […]

A metal structure in the innards of the XENON-nT experiment.
Physics

Dark matter experiments get a first peek at the ‘neutrino fog’ 

The neutrino “fog” is beginning to materialize. Lightweight subatomic particles called neutrinos have begun elbowing their way into the data of experiments not designed to spot them. Two experiments, built to detect particles of dark matter, have caught initial glimpses of neutrinos born in the sun, physicists report. “That’s a triumph,” says neutrino physicist Kate […]