Category: 7. SciTech

A single jab of a breakthrough gene therapy could reverse hearing loss in people within weeks, according to new research.

The cutting-edge…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

When Todd Sacktor was about to turn 3, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedroom next to mine. A swing set with two seats instead of one,” he said, recalling the lingering traces of her presence in the house….

The idea of evolution backtracking isn’t a completely new idea, but catching it in action isn’t an everyday experience.

A newly documented example of wild growing tomatoes on the black rocks of the Galapagos Islands gives researchers a prime example of a species adapting by rolling back…

“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”

Flash floods in this part of Texas are nothing new. Eight inches of rainfall in the state “could be on a…

A heartbeat-like pulse has been discovered beating deep beneath East Africa – and it’s ripping the continent apart.

The strange thumping is caused by a rhythmic surge of molten mantle rock rising and falling under the Earth’s surface, according to a recent study in Nature Geoscience. The…

In the late 19th century, while delivering a prominent lecture, Sir William Osler, regarded by many as the father of modern medicine, made a huge mistake.

Speaking in front of a class of aspiring doctors, Osler described patients with “recurring paroxysms of severe, even agonising cardiac

Scientists have observed a new type of black hole that is too heavy to have been born from a star but still too slim to act as an anchor for an entire galaxy. These black holes are being being referred to as “lite” intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH), and they’re extremely hard…

Power does strange things to people. Psychology papers are littered with examples of people behaving awfully – even unlawfully – when they feel powerful or consider themselves to be high-status. 

One famous paper, by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, reported the…

But the ESA was only meant to safeguard against “reasonably foreseeable future threats,” Willms argues. Congress has the ability to protect species indefinitely—like it did for wild horses under the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act or for numerous species of birds under the…

Fruits and vegetables are often sprayed with fungicides to keep mold at bay. However, new research suggests one of these chemicals could be quietly harming insects that are critical to healthy ecosystems and could lead to an insect apocalypse.

According to a study from Macquarie…