Research on the physical world, from particles and cells to ecosystems and galaxies. Coverage draws on biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, and space science.
A method that reads family trees inside 503 living genomes has pinpointed DNA from two archaic human populations that were never sequenced, one shared by all people and one that entered Oceanians through Denisovans.
A 13-sided shape that a retired print technician cut out of card in 2022 settled a question mathematicians had been chewing on for 60 years.
Physicists in Japan etched 372,100 holes into a silicon chip following the Smith hat tiling, then found that left-handed and right-handed circularly polarized light scatter off it differently, an asymmetry conventional quasicrystals cannot produce.
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.
Detached hawkmoth wings responded to two nightshade alkaloid precursors and ignored everything else, flower scent included. Cutting off the sensor-bearing margins changed nothing, and the hairs doing the smelling have not been found.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Northwestern’s cerebellum-inspired memtransistor stays idle through normal beats and fires only at the unexpected, hitting 98 percent accuracy where standard AI was still at 70–80. The catch: only the devices were built — the surrounding network was simulated.
A landmark National Academies report finds synthetic cells pose no wholly new risks, but calls for coordinated, adaptive federal governance of these life-blurring biotechnologies.
Why do identical orchard oaks yield black truffles in one spot and nothing nearby? New soil research points to hidden microbial differences.