Discover how new coronavirus variants formed around the world, and whether personal protective equipment and the new vaccines will successfully work against them.

How does a chili pepper make your mouth feel like its on fire? When you eat peppers, capsaicin molecules fit into the heat pain receptors of your mouth, sending a false signal to your brain that's identical to the one it would receive if you ate something literally burning hot.

Just about every solid, liquid, or gas in the world as we know it begins with reactions between individual atoms and molecules. Host David Pogue dives into the transformative world of chemical reactions, from the complex formula that produces cement to the single reaction that’s allowed farmers to feed a global population by the billions—a reaction that when reversed, unleashes high explosives.

When you eat peppers, the chemical capsaicin fits into the heat pain receptors in your mouth, sending a false signal that’s identical to the one your brain would receive if you ate something literally burning hot.

Scientists explore how the powerful peptides found in marine cone snail venom can be used for medicinal and therapeutic purposes.

One out of 50 COVID-19 tests in the U.S. are processed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here's how its researchers are tracking the spread of the coronavirus on campus, and how the University became a model of testing for other flagship universities.

The coronavirus pandemic may have been the biggest science news story of 2020, but it wasn't the only story. Learn more about three space developments of the year: the discovery of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere, the collapse of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo’s Observatory, and OSIRIS-REx’s sampling of an asteroid’s surface.

Some 30 million Americans have sent their DNA to be analyzed by companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. But what happens once the sample is in the hands of testing companies, and how accurate are their results? NOVA explores the power of genetic data to reveal family connections, ancestry, and health risks—and even solve criminal cold cases.

Half-sisters share their unlikely story of finding one another through genetic testing, and what they learned about their family history along the way.

Because of the Eurocentric bias of genetic reference databases, DNA ancestry test results for individuals of African and Asian descent are often less detailed than results for individuals of European descent.

Here’s how the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccines work, their potential side effects, who’s first in line to receive them, and why we need to address racial and social equities.

The CDC advises people to avoid travel for the 2020 holidays due to COVID-19 surges.

When Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire in 2019, Paris came perilously close to losing more than 800 years of history. As engineers rebuild, researchers use cutting-edge technology to piece together what happened and restore the cathedral.

After the Notre Dame fire of 2019, a team of architects and engineers must design a way to stabilize the famous cathedral's buttresses before its roof and entire structure collapses.

Discover the effects the fire had on Notre Dame's stained glass, and how one scientist is meticulously cleaning and repairing it.

By exploring Paris' underground tunnels, can scientists identify the original source of Notre Dame's vaulting stone, damaged in the 2019 fire?

President Trump said that he recovered from COVID-19 in part thanks to an antibody cocktail. What is an antibody cocktail and how does it work?

Election officials have braced for an unprecedented wave of mail-in ballots. What safeguards are in place to track individual ballots as they travel to voters and back to the election office?

As global temperatures rise, scientists are exploring solutions from planting trees to sucking carbon out of the air to geoengineering. But would they work? And what are the risks of engineering Earth's climate?

Scientists propose putting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect the sun's rays. But will this have unintended consequences?