The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating FrogCarly Anne YorkBasic Books, $30 What’s the purpose of your study? It’s the question many basic-science researchers dread. And it’s the question that Carly Anne York received about 10 years ago from a fellow volunteer at the Virginia Zoo. At the time, York was a Ph.D. student studying squid…
Last winter’s respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, season wasn’t as brutal for U.S. babies. A new study suggests two preventive tools — a maternal vaccine and a monoclonal antibody for infants — may have helped. The 2024-25 RSV season was the first in which the vaccine and the monoclonal antibody, which can prevent severe RSV…
Controlling sound has long been a staple of science fiction and fantasy. In Dune, the cone of silence allows characters to converse privately, even in open spaces. The eerie billboards of Blade Runner 2049 whisper advertisements into the ears of those passing by. In the real world, quirks of architecture, intentional or not, can direct…
A decades-old dental health treatment may soon vanish in the United States. Access to fluoride supplements, prescribed to prevent cavities in children without access to fluoridated water, is now under threat from a controversial move by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency announced May 13 that it plans to remove fluoride products that…
An at-home cervical cancer screening device was OK‘d by the FDA
Wavelike patterns in 115-million-year-old amber suggest that a long-ago tsunami inundated what is now northern Japan, researchers report May 15 in Scientific Reports. Tsunamis can be destructive and, to anything alive nearby, often terrifying. But the physical damage wrought by these giant waves eventually erodes away, typically leaving behind little evidence of their passage. As…