On March 10, 2020, 61 choir members rehearsed in a church hall in Skagit County, Wash. As they sang, a microscopic germ wafted through the air. Before the month’s end, 58 members were infected and ...

After a year that feels like it has pushed many of us apart, our selection of the top scientific insights of 2024 are nearly all about how we come together and how we’re interconnected—across time, ...

AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...

You’re walking fast, late for work. The line into the subway is barely moving. A man is walking very slowly, holding up everyone behind him. You’re annoyed. And then you catch a glimpse of him. He’s ...

The genetic code appeared on Earth at the origin of life, and the codes of culture arrived almost four billion years later. For a long time it has been assumed that these are the only codes that exist ...

The U.S. life sciences industry entered 2026 with surprising momentum, following threats of tariffs and disrupted trade, NIH funding cuts, and a sluggish IPO market. Accounting for more than ...

Johns Hopkins University will invest $80 million annually for each of the next two years in groundbreaking basic and applied research across a vast array of life science disciplines—from immunology to ...

From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year Joe Spring, ...

Understand the fundamentals that drive life. Do basic research that leads to medical breakthroughs and improvements in our world. Study the underlying chemistry of organisms and ecosystems. Help ...

It’s hard to talk about individual well-being these days without talking about what’s going on in the world, whether that’s the mental health fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, political polarization, ...