Category: LA Times Science

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Humans make more plastic than just about anything. And it will be with us for a very long time.

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Los Angeles, if you think traffic on the 101 is bad, be thankful you don’t live in Jakarta — especially since the city did away with its controversial carpool rules.

When vehicles on the main road into the Indonesian capital’s business district were required to have at least three occupants during…

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If the ubiquity of pollutants in modern life has you yearning for the simpler ways of California’s early residents, an unusual scientific experiment may prompt you to reconsider.

After constructing water vessels using the methods of prehistoric people who lived on the Channel Islands, researchers…

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Preventing the diseases we fear most as we age is rarely a sure or simple matter. But for those determined to slow mental decline and drive down the likelihood of developing dementia, researchers have reached a rare consensus around a trio of straightforward strategies: Engage your brain (but choose…

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An underwater cleanup of Newport Harbor this month yielded more than a half-ton of trash and other things that weren’t supposed to be in the water — including a gun.

In addition to the typical beer cans, cups and food packaging that get tossed or fall in, divers pulled up a shopping cart, a bicycle,…

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The best medicine for a person who goes into sudden cardiac arrest is an electric shock. That jolt temporarily stops the heart, along with its rapid or erratic beat. When the heart starts itself up again, it can revert to its normal rhythm and resume pumping blood to the brain and the rest of the…

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California’s attorney general argued Thursday that President Trump has no legal authority to revoke or modify national monuments created by previous administrations.

In an 11-page letter to the Interior Department, state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra vowed “to take any and all legal action necessary”…

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Gale Crater on Mars was once a lake separated into layers with different chemical compositions, a finding that provides evidence of past climate change on the Red Planet.

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Scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, have detected the signal from a cataclysmic collision between two black holes that lie 3 billion light-years away – much farther than the previous two discoveries.

The findings, described in a paper accepted to Physical…

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When babies are born, they draw their first breaths. Those gulps of oxygen trigger the lungs to stop developing.

When babies are born prematurely, the same thing happens. But a preemie’s lungs are critically underdeveloped. Scientific advancements have made it possible for babies born as early…

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Plastic trash is now so ubiquitous that researchers have found hundreds of tons of it floating in the Arctic Ocean.

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One day our human descendants may be able to go sightseeing in the glorious Saturn system. Until then, we have Cassini.

In the newly released video below, it almost feels as if you are peeking out of a spaceship window as it flies over the hexagon-shaped jet stream on Saturn’s north pole and then…

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The making of a memory champion, it turns out, is not so different from the making of any other great athlete.

To triumph in sport, athletes sculpt muscle and sinew and lash them together with head and heart to deliver optimum performance. To perform extraordinary feats of memorization, memory…

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It seems modern humans aren’t the only ones to have had regional cuisine. According to the plaque on their teeth, Neanderthals had striking differences in their diets, depending on where they lived — and they may have also used plants and mold to treat illness and pain.

The findings, described…

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You are living in an amazing time on planet Earth — mineralogically speaking.

Scientists say there are more unique minerals on our planet than ever before in its 4.5-billion-year history, and it’s thanks in part to us.

In a paper published this week in American Mineralogist, a team of researchers…

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It’s been clear for a while now that pregnant women who become infected with the Zika virus are more likely to have babies with microcephaly, neural tube defects and other serious problems. Now experts can say just how much bigger that risk is for these babies: 20 times greater than if their mothers…

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Indiana Jones may have found a few more lost temples if he’d known a thing or two about plants. By mapping the distribution of tree species with known archaeological sites in the Amazon basin, scientists have discovered that humans shaped the makeup of the Amazon forests over thousands of years.

…

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Scientists have found what they claim are the oldest-known fossils on Earth, embedded in Canadian rocks that are at least 3.7 billion years old.

If they are right, the discovery suggests that life on Earth began within 200 million to 500 million years of the birth of the planet 4.5 billion years…

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The earthquake risk for Oklahoma and southern Kansas is expected to remain significant in 2017, threatening 3 million people with seismic events that can produce damaging shaking, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey forecast released Wednesday.

The seismic risk is forecast to be so high that…

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The Food and Drug Administration’s restrictions on the dispensing of mifepristone — one half of the two-drug cocktail used to end a pregnancy in its first 10 weeks — “no longer makes clinical sense” and should be “expeditiously withdrawn,” experts argue in the New England Journal of Medicine.

As…