Science

A nuclear reactor that has been switched off does not go silent. The fuel left inside its core and in the cooling pools beside it keeps decaying for months and years, and every decay releases an antineutrino, a particle so reluctant to interact with matter that it slips through steel, concrete, and water without stopping. […]

Aging announces itself not with damage but with absence. Long before any disease or symptom appears, the body begins quietly losing specific cells: tendon cells, kidney cells, the stem cells that maintain muscle. Two atlases assembled by Junyue Cao’s laboratory at Rockefeller University, built from more than 20 million mouse cells, show that this disappearance […]

Every living cell on Earth descends from a single population of ancestors. Biologists call it LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, and the new question about it is not whether it existed, but how complete it was. A team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf argues that LUCA carried a working genetic code […]

For most substances, squeezing a solid raises the temperature at which it melts. For diamond, in a narrow and extreme window of pressure, the opposite happens. New experiments at the University of Rochester’s OMEGA laser facility show that between roughly 400,000 and 1 million times atmospheric pressure, crushing diamond harder actually lowers its melting temperature. […]

The adult brain was long thought to answer injury with a scar: reactive cells pile up at the edge of damaged tissue, walling it off, and the lost territory is never reclaimed. A team at the University of Zurich has now watched a different outcome in living mice. When a small patch of the cerebral […]

The Y chromosome is the one piece of the mammalian genome that most people assume is indispensable for making a male. A team of Japanese researchers has now shown it can simply be deleted. In a preprint posted August 4, scientists at RIKEN, the University of Yamanashi and Asahikawa Medical University report that a single […]

Most neuromorphic chips take their architecture from the cerebral cortex, the brain region that thinks. A team at Northwestern University instead built a chip from a different part of the brain entirely. The cerebellum, the fist-sized structure at the back of the skull, does not reason so much as predict, constantly comparing what the body […]

The average 80-year-old in the trial was taking five medications before anyone randomized them. That number, buried in the baseline characteristics of the SAGA/SITE study published this week in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, is the quiet engine behind a question that has divided cardiologists for a decade: when, if ever, is it safe to stop […]

Editor’s note: This is an opinion article. It reflects a position on current science policy and does not claim neutrality. STAT reported exclusively on August 7 that NIH is internally proposing to bar scientists on temporary visas from the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence awards, the single most important funding mechanism for early-career researchers who are […]

For two decades, chips made from atomically thin materials such as molybdenum disulfide have promised to scale smaller and switch faster than silicon. But every attempt to shrink the gate stack, the transistor’s most important component, has come at a cost: the thinner the insulator, the more it scatters the charge carriers the transistor is […]