The town of Borbón in northern Ecuador is home to several government and religious offices and a regional hospital. Nonetheless, Ecuador classifies Borbón as rural. That designation implies that Borbón’s residents should be relatively safe from dengue, a disease carried by a species of mosquito that, according to the World Health Organization, “lives in urban

If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States. It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on

The findings could be a preview of what’s to come if HPV vaccination rates improve Deaths from cervical cancer (cells illustrated) in the United States have dramatically declined since 2016, researchers say. Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus Rates of cervical cancer have decreased since a vaccine for human papillomavirus, or HPV, was introduced in

“Proteolethargy” is when proteins get stuck in chemical traffic jams instead of zipping around In response to cellular stress, proteins become ensnared in chemical traffic jams, creating a kind of widespread sluggishness scientists call “proteolethargy.” Jennifer Cook-Chrysos/Whitehead Institute As we age, our bodies slow down — not just in how we move, but also at

One of the most extraordinary fossil beds of Cretaceous creatures in the world formed about 125 million years ago, in what’s now northeastern China. Researchers have thought that the diverse members of this ancient community were abruptly buried by catastrophic volcanic flows of hot ash and rock. But that volcano doomsday scenario — sometimes referred

On the drive to school, at the first sign of trouble, “she made me get on the floorboard,” says the older son of pioneering Black entomologist Margaret S. Collins. He’s remembering the tense 1956 civil rights bus boycott in Tallahassee, Fla. As soon as young Herbert had wriggled to a safer spot on the floor

Scientists found memory’s molecular machinery at work in cells outside the nervous system Human embryonic kidney cells (seen in this false-color scanning electron micrograph) share some of the same molecular mechanisms as memory-forming neurons. David McCarthy/Science Source Kidney cells can make memories too. At least, in a metaphorical sense. Neurons have historically been the cell

Warming oceans have shifted the intensity of many Atlantic hurricanes up an entire category The warm surface of the North Atlantic Ocean boosted the wind speeds of Hurricane Milton in October, enhancing the tempest from Category 4 into Category 5. CSU/CIRA & NOAA As if hurricanes needed any more kick. Human-caused climate change is boosting

An upcoming mission will help determine how Phobos and Deimos formed Supercomputer simulations showed how an unlucky asteroid could be shredded as it passed close to Mars and eventually turn into a moon-forming ring of debris around the Red Planet. NASA, YouTube Mars’ moons could be the remains of an ill-starred asteroid that got too

ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other AI tools whip up impressive sentences and paragraphs from as little as a simple line of text prompt. To generate those words, the underlying large language models were trained on reams of text written by humans and scraped from the internet. But now, as generative AI tools flood the internet