A genetic data giant is falling, and it’s unclear what will happen to millions of people’s most intimate personal information in the aftermath. On March 23, DNA testing company 23andMe announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a move intended to facilitate its sale — along with the genetic data of over 15 million…
The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a distant galaxy blowing an unexpected bubble in the gas around it, just 330 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy, dubbed JADES-GS-z13-1, marks the earliest sign yet spotted of the era of cosmic reionization, a transformative period in the universe’s history when the first stars and…
Sharks may not be the sharp-toothed silent type after all. The clicking of flattened teeth, discovered by accident, could be “the first documented case of deliberate sound production in sharks,” evolutionary biologist Carolin Nieder, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and colleagues propose March 26 in Royal Society Open Science. Humankind has been slow…
What the island nation of Cape Verde cherishes as its own distinctive kind of date palm is getting an ancestry reveal. The Cape Verde date palm (Phoenix atlantica), native to the island nation it’s nicknamed for, is one of three trees there that don’t grow in the wild anywhere else. The islands, scattered off western…
A protein found in tardigrades — tiny animals less than a millimeter long — can protect mice from radiation damage. Most cancer patients undergo radiation therapy as part of their treatment, often leading to devastatingly painful side effects. But there may be hope for mitigating some of that damage. Mice with cells engineered to produce…
Everything Is TuberculosisJohn GreenCrash Course Books, $28 A few years ago, renowned author John Green met a boy named Henry at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. Henry was small and, at first glance, looked about 9 years old to Green. Everyone at the hospital seemed to know and love him, making Green believe he…