Latest Articles
The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules
Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials.
The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes
Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.
Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft
Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.
Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting
Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.
Tiny Tweaks to Neurons Can Rewire Animal Motion
Altering a protein in the neurons that coordinate a rattlesnake’s movement made a slow slither neuron more like a speedy rattle neuron, showing one way evolution can generate new ways of moving.
How This Marine Worm Can Tell Moonglow From Sunbeams
For the first time, scientists have decoded the molecular structure of a protein that helps to sync a biological clock to the phases of the moon.
Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue
After identifying interlocking symmetries in mammalian cells, scientists can describe some tissues as liquid crystals — an observation that lays the groundwork for a fluid-dynamic theory of how tissues move.
The Simple Geometry That Predicts Molecular Mosaics
By treating molecules as geometric tessellations, scientists devised a new way to forecast how 2D materials might self-assemble.