60-second Science

We present the latest updates on ChatGPT, Bard and other competitors in the artificial intelligence arms race.

An astronomy festival in Italy opted to make all of its events and workshops multisensory. The organizers wanted to see whether sound, touch and smell can, like sight, transmit the wonders of the cosmos.

A blind astronomer “sonified” the universe’s most explosive events: gamma-ray bursts. By listening to, rather than looking at, the data, she made a critical discovery and changed the field of astronomy.

Space is famously silent, but astronomers and musicians are increasingly turning astronomical data into sound as a way to make discoveries and inspire people who are blind or visually impaired.

One researcher has been hiring planes to strafe the sky over the Amazon rain forest to collect the air coming off the trees, and what she is finding is cause for alarm.

Consumers can now get easy tests for Alzheimer’s. But these tests may not really help patients that much—yet.

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón discusses her involvement in NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and the inspiration behind her poem, which will travel onboard the spacecraft.

Caterpillars can’t regulate their body temperatures, so they have to come up with a totally different strategy to make it through the coldest months of the year.

A honeybee swarm has as much electric charge as a thundercloud, and the insects’ mass movements in the atmosphere might even have some influence on the weather.

The new field of digital bioacoustics is using machine learning to try decipher animal speak, including honeybee toots and quacks and whoops.

Are you working really hard to learn something? Remember this counterintuitive fact, and you might improve your learning curve.

The bite of the lone star tick makes people allergic to a sugar found in mammalian products, and many doctors don’t know about it.

A “Darwinian paradox” is that homosexual activity occurs even though it does not lead to or aid in reproduction. But if you visit three capuchin monkeys in Los Angeles, they’ll show you how beneficial their liaisons are.

The Luddites did not hate technology—but they did fight the way it was used to exploit humans.

Xenotransplants could help to solve the organ transplant crisis—if researchers can get the science right.

Light is a very dangerous, if not so obvious, threat to birds who migrate at night. But researchers are using weather radar to track birds and provide “lights out” forecasts to help keep their paths clear of visual distraction.

Science is turning to machines to unlock the secrets of the vast, mysterious pulse-of-the-planet phenomenon that is nocturnal migration.

If you really want to challenging your bird identification skills, try using them at night, when bird calls are less than 100 milliseconds long.

For thousands of years, no one truly knew how birds migrated—that is, until a few unlikely pioneers sat in an empty field with hundreds of pounds of kludged together recording gear and waited to hear sounds that no one had ever captured.

On any given night, dense clouds of dark, ghostly figures pass over your head as you sleep. Maybe you never knew they were there, but there are people out there who are deciphering all the unseen movement that happens amid the darkness.