What We're Reading

A huge flare from a black hole helps reveal how matter and energy are expelled.

After training on 17,000 publicly available photos of patients affected by more than 200 rare disorders, a computer program called DeepGestalt learned to recognize facial features linked to hundreds of genetic syndromes.

The shutdown, now in its third week, has emptied some laboratories, forced scientists from the field, upended important conferences, imperiled the flow of grant money and disrupted careful planning of time-sensitive studies.

The real journey to the center of the Earth has begun, and scientists are discovering subsurface microbial beings that shake up what we think we know about life.

Fundamental discoveries don’t always have practical uses, but they have soul-saving applications. Times columnist Bret Stephens lays out the importance of cultivating curiosity.

Marc Kastner, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance (of which the Simons Foundation is a founding member), argues that philanthropy plays a small but critical role in supporting research that government may not undertake and that it can fund explorations that might otherwise languish on the idea shelf.

The flyby of Ultima Thule has already cleared up one mystery: why the light reflecting off the snowman-shaped object does not fluctuate, as might be expected from an irregular spinning body. The reason: the rotation axis is pointed at the spacecraft.

University scientists aspire to gain the esteem of their peers but are also terrified of earning their scorn. Such feelings drive U.S. scholarship and make it the envy of the world, argues David Labaree of Stanford University in this essay.

Scientists at UC San Francisco have developed an innovative tool to peer into the secret life of brain cells.

This Nature editorial discusses the value in studying the genome of the legendary Galapagos giant tortoise, which holds clues about longevity.