Research on the physical world, from particles and cells to ecosystems and galaxies. Coverage draws on biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, and space science.
Northwestern researchers scanned thousands of federal grant proposals for signs of chatbot writing. Moving from light to heavy AI involvement came with a four-point rise in the chance of NIH funding. It also came with ideas that were closer to what the agency had recently funded. At NSF, neither pattern appeared.
Gaia observations of 110 Milky Way star clusters challenge the assumption that stars everywhere are born in the same proportions. A telltale bend in their stellar mass distributions varies with cluster age, evidence that the stellar initial mass function depends on the conditions in which stars form.
Two studies published days apart test how well artificial intelligence explains human reading. Language models match the forward glide of our eyes but fail on rereading. A second model, trained to budget its attention like a person, gets much closer.
A brain-inspired memory network fed heavily skewed patterns can look like it is recalling something when it is only agreeing with the majority. Rewriting the learning rule so it tracks each neuron’s departure from its own average restored recall at every bias level the researchers tested.
Researchers ran a method built to find words in baby talk on recordings of Bengalese finch song and found the same statistical signature that already turned up in human language and humpback whale calls, present from a bird’s very first cracked notes.
Clavina routes photons through reusable linear and nonlinear modules instead of rebuilding the hardware for each task. The result is not a fault-tolerant quantum computer yet, but it is a credible architecture for one.
Physicists funneled concentrated sunlight into a nonlinear crystal and pulled out polarization-entangled photon pairs, the first entanglement ever measured from a sunlight-pumped source. The pairs violated Bell’s inequality, showing that lasers are optional for quantum light.
A protein already linked to Alzheimer’s turns out to hijack mitochondria directly, flipping their energy production into reverse and flooding nerve cells with reactive molecules, according to a new multi-species study.
A survey of over five thousand Brazilian adults finds that deja vu, visions and out-of-body sensations follow oddly similar patterns of interpretation, and most people count the experience as a net positive within their own lives.
Neuroplasticity lets the brain rewire at any age, but not without limits. See what the evidence on training, injury, and aging actually shows.
A Göttingen physics team reconstructed the full 3D wavefunction of an organic semiconductor molecule using a lab-bench extreme ultraviolet source, imaging orbitals that once demanded a synchrotron and hinting at future femtosecond movies.
A compartmental model built at Lehigh University turns the vagus nerve’s control of digestion into equations that run on a laptop, reproducing how a simulated stomach empties and stalls under stress before any therapy is tested in patients.