For decades, cancer treatments have been given to patients continually at the maximum dose that can be tolerated. But a few labs are challenging that dogma. They are motivated by theoretical models of cancer growth and evidence from animal studies suggesting that briefly stopping or cutting back a drug dose can help keep the cancer cells from becoming...

Could online data enhance polling as a forecasting tool, or even replace it? Polling, whether done by phone or door-to-door, is labor intensive and expensive. And response rates have fallen to single digits, leaving pollsters to rely on a thin and biased sample. By contrast, analyzing tweets, for instance, allows researchers to track the political opinions...

How prescient were Science's editors and writers when they picked three areas to watch in 2016, as part of the 2015 Breakthrough of the Year package? On gravitational waves, they were spot on: The detection of the infinitesimal ripples in spacetime became Science's 2016 Breakthrough of the Year. The prediction that we may finally know where dogs came...

Science picked four areas likely to attract attention in 2017. The ability to keep human embryos developing in the lab for almost 2 weeks—achieved for the first time this year—should provide new insights into very early human development, and generate debate on whether ethical limits on studying embryos in culture should be extended. Candidate Zika...

Scientists caught in political crossfires and the failure of a blood-testing technology to live up to commercial hype achieved the dubious distinction of Science's 2016 breakdowns of the year. In Turkey, a crackdown following a failed coup attempt on 15 July resulted in the arrest or firing of tens of thousands of public employees suspected of supporting...

Working nights is unavoidable, or at least commonplace, in certain scientific fields. If you want to study bat behavior or stellar nebulae or sleep physiology, you may have to become half-nocturnal yourself, and scientists who sign up for the night shift encounter problems that just don't arise during the day. They tumble down embankments in the pitch...