Emergency teams responding to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo began on May 21 inoculating those most at risk of contracting the virus: health workers and people who have come into contact with Ebola victims. It’s the first real-world test for an experimental vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV. In field trials in Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2015, this vaccine […]

An asteroid that flouts the norms of the solar system might not be from around here. The renegade asteroid travels around the sun in reverse — in the opposite direction of the planets and most other asteroids (SN: 5/13/17, p. 5). Now two scientists suggest that’s because the space rock originated from outside the solar system, according to […]

The first reported case in a big city has health officials worried. Ebola has reemerged. The virus has killed at least 25 people since early April in an ongoing outbreak in Congo.  And on May 18, the World Health Organization declared a “high” public health risk in Congo, as well as a “high risk” of the […]

Exactly how long a neutron lives is currently under debate. Now researchers suggest this mystery could be solved if neutrons sometimes decay into particles of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up more than four-fifths of all matter in the universe. A flurry of research is now putting this notion to the test. […]

Limiting global warming this century to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures would be a boon to the planet’s biodiversity. This lower warming threshold, compared with warming of 2 degrees C, will preserve much larger swaths of the geographic ranges of tens of thousands of land-based species of plants, vertebrates and insects living on the planet, […]

People who moved out of southern China cultivated big changes across ancient Southeast Asia, a new analysis of ancient human DNA finds. Chinese rice and millet farmers spread south into a region stretching from Vietnam to Myanmar. There, they mated with local hunter-gatherers in two main pulses, first around 4,000 years ago, and again two […]

An international team of astronomers used ALMA to observe a distant galaxy called MACS1149-JD1. They detected a very faint glow emitted by ionised oxygen in the galaxy. As this infrared light travelled across space, the expansion of the Universe stretched it to wavelengths more than ten times longer by the time it reached Earth and […]

What do land mines and tuberculosis have in common? Both kill people in developing countries — and both can be sniffed out by rodents that grow up to 3 feet, head to tail. Since 2000, the international nonprofit APOPO has partnered with Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture to train African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) to pick […]

Memory transfer has been at the heart of science fiction for decades, but it’s becoming more like science fact. A team successfully transplanted memories by transferring a form of genetic information called RNA from one snail into another. The snails were trained to develop a defensive reaction. When the RNA was inserted into snails that […]

Russian scientists, after successfully implanting and achieving full functionality of a frozen frog heart after 45 days of cryogenic preservation, have now fully restored a frozen rat heart after 24 hours of hypothermic storage. Sputnik contacted the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects for more info. On March 4, Russian media reported that a team […]