Manganese is added to nickel-rich battery cathodes to protect them. A South Korean team found that if the raw powder meets air before baking, the shield turns corrosive and can double how fast the cell fades. Extra lithium reverses it.
Five preregistered experiments with 3,272 US participants found that people with a stake in an issue read genuinely middle-ground positions as belonging to their opponents. The pattern held only where the issue was moralized and the other side felt threatening, and it did not appear when the moderate was described as rejecting both sides rather than accepting both.
Drones now account for most casualties on both sides, hold ground with fewer than 100 soldiers per mile, and run on Chinese components. A new policy memo argues the West is reading the lesson too slowly.
A quirk of quantum measurement could stop one whole class of quantum computer in its tracks. The more qubits you add, the smaller the energy gap the machine relies on becomes, while noise from the surroundings goes on checking up on it just as often as before. All that checking holds the calculation still.
New modelling in Science puts the peak at roughly ten times today’s diversity between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago — and finds the collapse began with the first multinational empires, not European colonialism. The pre-agricultural world, it turns out, had fewer languages than we do now. The authors call it a coarse global model rather than a census.
A new White House science report assembles the metascience case that American research funding has seized up: average age at first NIH grant rose from 36 to 42, drug approvals per billion dollars have fallen eightyfold since 1950, and reviewers scoring the same proposal routinely disagree. It’s a policy document, and it quotes no independent scientists.
A University of Guadalajara team found levodopa-treated mice slipped from near-normal forelimb symmetry to 30.4 per cent by day 30, while mice given levodopa plus freeze-dried bee venom held at 50.9. Separate research on beekeepers, who are stung constantly, found no reduced Parkinson’s risk.
UMass Amherst researchers trained a legal language model on 34,112 passages from six decades of dissents and found concession rates are entirely unrelated to how harsh a justice sounds.
Republican sponsorship predicted antivaccine bills regardless of statehouse control, and vaccine legislation tripled after 2019 as antivaccine measures kept reaching governors’ desks.
The textbook version has tunas seizing the niche left by the K-Pg extinction. A new Yale phylogeny dates at least two of three endothermy origins to 10–15 million years after the impact, and the big body-size jump to 10.6 million years ago. The caveat: the branches are long enough that the traits could have appeared anywhere along them.
Cambridge economists tracking 4,405 launches liken SpaceX’s grip to the East India Company’s, warning a near-monopoly has every reason to charge what the market bears even as underlying costs collapse.
Likweli is only the fifth new African monkey named in 75 years, and it split from its closest cousin 4–5 million years ago — the deepest divergence in the colobus family. Wide rivers and poor-soil forest appear to have fenced it into a range the size of a small city, where it’s already endangered.