Genetics

What causes rivers to suddenly change course?

Displacement is in the nature of a river. But when a river breaks from its channel and carves a new path across the landscape, devastating floods can descend on communities with little or no warning. For decades, researchers have struggled […]

Space

NASA's Europa mission is a homecoming for a planet...

Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti remembers exactly where she was the first time she heard that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might host life. It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University studying images of the planet’s […]

Physics

Tech companies want small nuclear reactors. Here's...

To feed artificial intelligence’s voracious appetite for energy, tech companies are turning to small nuclear reactors. Last week, Google and Amazon announced deals with companies that are developing small modular reactors. These reactors would produce less power than current reactors, […]

Space

JWST marks the first known "steam world".

This exoplanet’s atmosphere is going full steam ahead. A planet beyond our solar system called GJ 9827d has an atmosphere composed almost entirely of hot water molecules, astronomers report in Astrophysical Journal Letters October 4. “We’re using the term ‘steam […]