As the youthful universe congealed under the pull of gravity, matter knotted itself into galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments, weaving a dazzlingly intricate cosmic web. This web’s structure is thanks, in part, to the handiwork of neutrinos — lightweight, subatomic particles that surge through the cosmos in unimaginable numbers. Because they streak about at high […]

Bhavin Shastri still gets excited when he sees a laser pointer, and he’s been fascinated by them since he was about 10 years old. “I was amazed that a light beam could maintain its brightness, centered in a tiny spot even after traveling a great distance,” Shastri says. “A laser pointer in my hand felt like a […]

Symptoms of depression fluctuate over time, but many brain imaging studies of the condition only study one point in time. That’s made it hard to connect networks of brain activity to various symptoms and mood changes. Now, a new study using long-term brain imaging data shows one brain network involved in guiding attention is nearly […]

At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buying A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.” Determined to rectify this wrong, Slatyer […]

Electric vehicles promise to help wean us off of fossil fuels, but they introduce a new problem: how to get enough of the lithium that EV batteries require (SN: 5/7/19). Materials scientist Chong Liu of the University of Chicago has some ideas. Existing technology can extract lithium only from sources with highly concentrated ions, like […]

After a devastating spinal cord injury, mice’s nerve cells balloon up in size. Some of these neurons stay swollen longer than expected and begin to die, a study published September 25 in Science Translational Medicine shows. A drug that brought this swelling down improved the mice’s recovery, though it’s not yet known if the approach […]