Science X Dialog

Football is a lab for studying the many dimensions of head injury. From defensive backs running at the pace of a sprinter downhill into a 220-pound muscular running back at full speed, to 400-plus-pound linemen knocking heads ...

At an international heritage symposium in Japan, I heard a word that stayed with me: "contaminated." The discussion concerned whether Indigenous peoples needed to be named explicitly in a new World Heritage framework. One ...

The Ramsar Convention is the world's longest-standing international treaty for wetland and waterbird protection. Signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971, the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl ...

One of the most fascinating aspects of physics is that nature often behaves in ways that seem completely counterintuitive. A good example comes from ultrathin materials. If I take a sheet of material and make it thinner ...

Binary asteroid systems are widespread throughout our inner solar system. For decades, the standard paradigm held that many of them form when a rapidly spinning primary asteroid casts off material, which then reaccumulates ...

Most sharks and rays inhabit the oceans, but a small proportion thrive in freshwater. Approximately 4% to 5% of all shark and ray species live in tropical and subtropical rivers around the world. Two main ecological strategies ...

What if a common herb found in the kitchen could help farmers grow healthier crops? As the global population grows and agriculture faces increasing environmental challenges, scientists are searching for innovative ways to ...

The arrival of winter marks not only a change in weather, temperature, and day length, but also a change in our activity and behavior. The social outdoor events and trips to the beach over summer soon become a distant memory, ...

How does nature build one of the most sophisticated catalytic metal centers found in biology? An international team of researchers has now resolved a long-standing debate surrounding the assembly of the active site of [FeFe]-hydrogenases—enzymes ...

The Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is famous because adults look like overgrown babies, or tadpoles, retaining juvenile features as adults and capable of remarkable regeneration of lost limbs or tails. New studies ...

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a common respiratory virus that can cause severe breathing complications in babies, especially those younger than 6 months old. While many adults recover quickly from RSV with mild symptoms ...

In a new open-access study that I published with my late colleague Kostya Trachenko from Queen Mary University of London, I propose a surprisingly simple nonlinear mathematical equation that unifies 12,000 years of human ...