Science Bytes

A model from the University of Bern reconstructing a millennium of California seismic history reveals that tectonic stress along two major faults has reached an all-time peak. By simulating how historical earthquakes shift forces over time, researche... more

When the Black Death devastated human populations in 1347, nature quickly reclaimed the abandoned Italian countryside. Ancient oaks reveal a massive, synchronized pulse of tree establishment that began in the early 1400s across contrasting landscapes... more

Part 3 of 3, the finale. Two chemists in two countries land on the same idea in the same year - that an acid simply hands off a proton - while a third reframes the whole subject around the electron pair. We cover the Bronsted-Lowry and Lewis theories... more

Part 2 of 3. A Swedish graduate student nearly flunks his thesis for claiming that acids shatter into charged ions in water - then wins a Nobel Prize for the same idea. The story of the classical ionic theory: Arrhenius's electrolytic dissociation, O... more

Part 1 of 3. Before anyone wrote H+ on a chalkboard, acids were known by their sour bite and bases by their slippery feel. We trace the first real theories of acidity: Robert Boyle's color-changing indicators, Lavoisier's confident but wrong claim th... more

Science fiction has long promised that cryogenic freezing could preserve life, but freezing actually destroys the brain by creating jagged ice crystals. A new study shows how researchers successfully preserved adult mouse brain tissue by turning it i... more

We usually assume that emotions spread through face-to-face interaction, but a landmark 2014 study showed that feelings can be contagious through text alone. By secretly filtering the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 Facebook users, researchers proved th... more

In 1924, Spemann and Mangold showed that a small patch of embryonic tissue could induce an entire second body axis - the 'organizer.' This Nature study finds the same master switch in a ctenophore, or comb jelly, one of the earliest-branching animals... more