Science X Dialog

When most people think about natural selection, they imagine individuals competing with one another: The fastest animal escapes predators, the strongest plant produces more seeds, and the most resistant bacteria better survive ...

We like to think that animals follow the crowd. If most of the group does something, surely the individual will copy. But what if the story is more complicated? What if the deciding factor isn't just what the majority is ...

Current global climate models (GCMs) support with high confidence the view that rising greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings account for nearly all observed global surface warming—slightly above 1 °C—since ...

If you've ever watched a glass blower at work, you've seen a material behaving in a very special way. As it cools, the viscosity of molten glass increases steadily but gradually, allowing it to be shaped without a mold. Physicists ...

Neural crest cells are a population of stem cells that invade the embryo in early development. They play a big role in what you look like: the pigments of your eyes, of your skin, and the bone structure of your face are all ...

The standard cosmological model (present-day version of "Big Bang," called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift ...

Can we use nothing more than sunlight and inexpensive materials to produce clean hydrogen fuel while also removing toxic pollutants from water? That question shaped our recent work with γ-In2S3, a semiconductor that has ...

I still vividly remember the first time we observed neurons responding not to audible sound, but to concentrated, precisely calibrated ultrasonic pulses. On the screen in front of us, calcium signals from brain cells began ...

Many have spent much of their career studying disasters—how people perceive risk, how institutions communicate, and why preparedness so often falls short of good intentions. But this study forced me to confront something ...

Hospital beds are a brutally concrete resource. When they're full, surgeries get delayed, hallways become overflow wards, and staff burn out. So a question I keep coming back to is simple: can the way we label food, those ...

In recent years, numerous landslides on hillsides in urban and rural areas have underscored that understanding and predicting these phenomena is more than an academic curiosity—it is a human necessity. When unstable slopes ...

Remember seeing your triglyceride levels in your lab report? Ah! Fats you may dismiss, thinking of the next gym work you need to head to. Fatty acids are broken down via a process called β-oxidation. But did you ever wonder ...