Science

Does a whiff of pollen trigger a sneeze or a cough? Scientists have discovered nerve cells that cause one response versus another: ‘sneeze neurons’ in the nasal passages relay sneeze signals to the brain, and separate neurons send cough messages, according to a study1 performed in mice.

On May 11, 2022, a rocket soared skyward off the northernmost rocket range in the world in Svalbard, Norway. More than 50 years before this Arctic launch, U.S.

One of the biggest puzzles we face about the Universe is that we have no explanation for a great many of the properties that the fundamental objects within it possess.

On a sweltering day in July 2023, a ragtag group of data wonks sat around a table at U Zlatého Tygra, or the Golden Tiger, a historic bar in Prague’s Old Town. A mild sense of outrage hung in the air between jokes about who among them looked the most Medieval.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. For the last week or so, I’ve been obsessed with a gas that I’d never given much thought to before.

Urban spillover is becoming a greater threat as wildfires grow. From downtown Los Angeles all the way out to the edge of the Line Fire is sprawl that turns into more sprawl.

When it was first discovered, the coelacanth caused a lot of excitement. It was a living example of a group of fish that was thought to only exist as fossils. And not just any group of fish.

Scientists just realized five years of work on a surprising physics topic: mayonnaise, an example of a “soft solid” that may hold the key to stabilizing nuclear fusion reactions.

In the more than six million years since people and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor, human brains have rapidly amassed tissue that helps decision-making and self-control.