If you’re feeling sick and you want to know what’s wrong with you, there’s an app for that. But the diagnosis won’t be as accurate as the one you’d get from a doctor — not by a long shot.
In a head-to-head comparison, real human physicians outperformed a collection of 23 symptom-checker apps and...
California has a complicated relationship with wildfires.
Though drought and climate change have helped make conflagrations in the Sierra Nevada increasingly powerful, fires aren’t all bad.
Wildfires, under the right conditions, help to increase the variety of birds found in the forest, according...
While the 2016 science Nobel laureates hailed from well outside the Golden State, three local universities celebrated two winners with a California connection: physics laureate Duncan Haldane and chemistry laureate Fraser Stoddart.
Haldane, currently of Princeton University, previously taught at...
Just days before the European Space Agency’s Rosetta orbiter face-planted onto a comet, NASA’s Kepler space telescope was busy taking the long view.
At the same time that Rosetta was capturing its final breathtaking images of the surface of a comet, the Kepler spacecraft put its planet-hunting...
San Clemente Island has been invaded by foreign intruders, threatening inhabitants of the volcanic isle owned by the Navy.
The island is home to the only ship-to-shore bombardment training range in the United States, but this invasion isn’t part of a military exercise. The intruders are thousands...
Leave it to a guy in a King Kong suit to demonstrate that humans’ thinking abilities aren’t quite as special as we’d like to think.
Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, only humans were given credit for being able to ascertain the unstated thoughts, beliefs and desires of others. (Of course,...
All hail the urban tree.
These woody wonders standing sentinel along sidewalks and in city parks do more to improve our lives than most of us realize.
Trees filter our air and water and increase biodiversity in our neighborhoods by providing habitats for animals. Just being near them has been shown...
Do you know someone who spends a long time yawning? He may not be lazy he may just have a big, neuron-rich brain.
A new study published this week in Biology Letters found the amount of time it takes for a mammal to complete a yawn strongly predicts the size of the critters’ brain and number of...
It was an injury unlike any Dr. Elisha Brownson had seen — a young man whose teeth were blown out when his electronic cigarette exploded in his mouth. His injuries were so severe he was admitted to the trauma intensive care unit.
“I had never heard of an injury mechanism like this before,” said...
Life-extension zealots have championed many strategies aimed at prolonging our days here on Earth, and not all sound like much fun (I’m thinking specifically about caloric restriction). Super-centenarians — those rare humans who live beyond the age of 110 — by contrast seem to embrace much more...
Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa have won this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing molecular machines.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says molecular machines "will most likely be used in the development of things such as new materials, sensors and energy...
When it comes to the science of climate change — its causes, its consequences, and what can be done to stop it — liberals and conservatives continue to see things very differently, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.
In a survey of 1,534 randomly selected Americans from across...
David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in physics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday cited their "theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter."
The Times will update this article.
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The nation’s top health officials on Monday laid out their plans for spending $1.1 billion in newly appropriated federal funds to combat the threat posed by the Zika virus.
At the same time, they vented frustration at Congress for taking so long to make the money available as the virus spread to...
Even in our increasingly partisan society, you might have figured that your doctor’s office would be neutral territory. But that just goes to show how naive you are.
A new study from researchers at Yale University details significant differences in the way primary care physicians from across the...
Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the mechanisms of autophagy.
The Karolinska Institute said autophagy is a "fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components."
The Times will update this article.
MORE IN SCIENCE
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Everyone knows sugar makes us feel good.
Studies have shown that sweet foods can improve adult humans’ moods and reduce crying and grimacing in babies when they are poked in the foot by researchers. But does it work on insects?
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London wanted to see whether they...
In a presidential election season dominated by talk of birth certificates, tax returns and email servers, science has rarely made headlines. But that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. On the contrary, policy decisions made by the next president will influence the future of the planet and all its inhabitants...
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is about to come to an end, and you can watch for the final signal live, right here.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be streaming live from ESA’s European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, where scientists from around the world...
An international team of astronomers has discovered what might be the first evidence of density-driven spiral arms in the gas and dust around a still-forming star.
The findings, described in the journal Science, could offer an unprecedented glimpse at a key stage in a young star’s life, and may...
