Casey Fiesler, an information science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, learned late on Friday evening that one of the three grants she had been awarded by the National Science Foundation was being terminated.

“It was a total surprise,” Dr. Fiesler said. “This is the one that I thought was totally safe.”

The grant supported Dr. Fiesler’s research on building A.I. literacy. She received no official explanation for why the grant was being terminated more than a year ahead of its scheduled end. But Dr. Fiesler speculated that it had something to do with the word “misinformation” in the award’s abstract.

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The Trump administration has replaced the government’s main portal for information about Covid with a website arguing that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, throwing its weight behind a theory of the pandemic’s origins that is so far not backed by direct evidence and that has divided intelligence agencies.

Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov, federal websites that used to deliver information about Covid and allow people to order tests, now redirect to the lab leak web page. Carrying an image of President Trump flanked by the words “Lab Leak,” the new page is illustrated by a satellite image of Wuhan, China, the city where Covid began spreading, and says it will describe “the true origins of Covid-19.”

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The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos.

Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.

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For decades, fishermen sailing off the coast of Taiwan have sometimes discovered fossils in their trawling nets: the bones of elephants, buffalo and other big mammals that lived tens of thousands of years ago, when the sea level was so low that Taiwan was linked to Asia by a land bridge.

But in 2010, a Taiwanese paleontologist was presented with a particularly odd find: a fossil that looked like half a gorilla’s jaw. Scientists have puzzled over it ever since.

Continue reading “With a Jawbone, Scientists Expand the Ancient Range of a Mysterious Human Relative” →

The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a cubic millimeter of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding.

Continue reading “An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible” →