Huge crowds gather in the Spanish city of Pamplona for the Feast of San Fermín.Credit: Danny Lehman/Getty Researchers studying the movement of crowds at a traditional Spanish festival have shown that densely packed groups of people form swirling ‘vortex’ patterns never before documented in human gatherings. The discovery, published on 5 February in Nature1, contrasts…

Events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which put a spotlight on US health disparities, led to increased domestic helicopter research in the country.Credit: Scott Hurd/Alamy ‘Helicopter research’ doesn’t happen just when researchers from rich countries swoop in and exploit the resources of low-income ones — rich universities are increasingly taking advantage of poorer institutions in…

Burien’s Environmental Science Center will host its annual “Heroes for Nature” Gala from 4:30 – 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Mar. 1, 2025, at the Brockey Center at South Seattle College. The event, dedicated to celebrating the beauty of nature and the power of education, science, and community, will feature an elegant evening of fundraising, networking, and environmental advocacy. The gala kicks…

Researchers think that for some tasks, generative AI tools can already do a better job than humans. Credit: Getty Using artificial intelligence (AI) tools for processes such as preparing manuscripts, writing grant applications and peer review will become widely accepted within the next two years, suggests a survey of nearly 5,000 researchers in more than…

The headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.Credit: Getty The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has mandated that all scientific manuscripts produced by its researchers that are under review at a journal be withdrawn so that certain language relating to gender can be stripped from them.…

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston transplanted a modified pig kidney into a living person for the first time in 2024.Credit: Massachusetts General Hospital The first clinical trial testing whether pig kidneys can be safely transplanted into living people has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As part of the…

Over the course of the last two decades, few people have become as synonymous with powder predictions as Joel Gratz, the owner and founder of OpenSnow. What began as a simple email to friends and family in 2007 has evolved into a worldwide following as skiers and snowboarders eagerly, and frequently, rely on his forecasts…

Abstract Optical metasurfaces are judiciously nanostructured thin films capable of manipulating the flow of light in a myriad of new ways. During the past two decades, we have witnessed a true revolution in the basic science that underlies their operation. As a result, these powerful optical elements can now deliver never-seen-before optical functions and transformed…

Credit: DMP/Getty More than 8,000 of the world’s most-cited scientists have at least one retraction, according to a database that links retractions to top-cited papers1. An analysis of the database, published in PLOS Biology on 30 January, attempts to map the scale of retractions and understand how they manifest. “Not every retraction is a sign…

Abstract In social science, formal and quantitative models, ranging from ones that describe economic growth to collective action, are used to formulate mechanistic explanations of the observed phenomena, provide predictions, and uncover new research questions. Here, we demonstrate the use of a machine learning system to aid the discovery of symbolic models that capture non-linear…