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 you want to store information for a very long time, possibly forever, DNA is the way to do it, says James Banal, a chemist at MIT and technical director of a biotechnology company called Cache DNA, headquartered in San Carlos, Calif. DNA stores the genetic…
Author: houssem23
In its latest global climate report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that July was the 14th straight month of record-breaking heat. That, in and of itself, is a new record. In the last 175 years, there has been only one other hot streak that comes close in terms of longevity. According to NOAA, the second longest hot streak on record spanned the 12 months from May 2015 to May 2016 (SN: 1/20/16; SN: 1/14/21). Then things drop off: The third and fourth longest recorded streaks were six months each, and subsequent stints are shorter still. Many of these…
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 small number of cases around the world, including in the United States. Even as clade II cases declined globally, infections with clade I mpox shot up in Congo. Nevertheless, the first mpox emergency ended in 2023. The sometimes deadly clade I virus has now…
Access to clean water is a human right — one that half of the world may not have. Out of the roughly 8 billion people on Earth, more than 4.4 billion lack access to safely managed drinking water, researchers report August 15 in Science. The estimate, based on computer simulations of data from low- and middle-income countries, is more than double the figure calculated by the World Health Organization (SN: 8/16/18). “The number of people whose basic human right to safe drinking water is not being met may therefore be significantly underestimated,” says environmental microbiologist Esther Greenwood of Eawag, an…
Imagine going on a weeklong business trip and not coming home until the following year. That may be the situation for U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose eight-day mission to the International Space Station has already stretched to more than two months and is likely to go even longer. The pair launched to the space station on a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5. The plan was for them to come back on the same ship eight days later. But helium leaks and issues with the spacecraft’s thrusters made NASA and Boeing decide to delay…
In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 10 percent of children die before they turn 5 years old (SN: 8/3/22); in 2022 alone, around 2.8 million young children died in the entire region. Most are dying from pneumonia, diarrhea or malaria — diseases that can be treated with antibiotics. But prescribing antibiotics to all children under 5 increases the risk of disease-causing bacteria developing a resistance to the medication, so current recommendations limit routine, widespread antibiotics to infants between 1 and 11 months old. Now, a new study finds that treating everyone younger than 5 not only benefits older kids…
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 Scholberg of Duke University, who was not involved with the research. The hints of these neutrinos are a long-awaited sign of the detectors’ improving performance. “It’s actually a milestone,” Scholberg says. Known as the “neutrino fog,” the signature suggests a new way of studying the difficult-to-detect…
Any way you slice it, a paper cut is painful. Magazines, letters and books harbor a devious potential for minor self-induced agony. But other types of paper — like thin tissue paper or the thicker stuff used for postcards — are less likely to offend. Scientists have now explained the physics behind why some paper is more prone to shred fingers. In experiments with a gelatin replica of human tissue, researchers found that a thin sheet of paper tended to buckle before it could cut. Thick paper typically indented the material but didn’t pierce it: Like a dull knife blade,…
Soon people will be able to subdue a severe allergic reaction with a nasal spray instead of an injection. On August 9, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first epinephrine nasal spray for the treatment of severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, in adults and kids who weigh 30 kilograms or more. Called neffy, the spray is expected to be available by early October and to cost $25 with insurance and $199 without for a two-pack, according to ARS Pharmaceuticals, neffy’s maker. The nasal spray device is the same style used for the opioid-reversal medicine Narcan (SN: 12/14/23). The…
Scientists have just slashed the potential hiding spaces for dark matter particles. The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has searched for and ruled out the existence of dark matter particles with a wide swath of properties, researchers report August 26 at two conferences. Dark matter is a substance whose influence can be seen on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but which has never been directly detected. LZ searches for a hypothetical type of dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically WIMPs with masses above 9 billion electron volts. (For comparison, a proton has a mass of…