Science

The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced July 9 that it will commit up to $160 million over five years to develop a new model for treating rare genetic diseases: custom, in vivo gene editing drugs made for individual patients or small groups sharing the same mutation. The program, called THRIVE (Treating […]

Tau protein is best known for what happens when it goes wrong. In Alzheimer’s disease and related tauopathies, Tau forms neurofibrillary tangles, disrupts cellular transport, and is implicated in mitochondrial dysfunction, a hallmark of neurodegeneration. This pathological picture is so dominant that the protein’s normal, day-to-day function is often reduced to a single line: it […]

Benchmark of 23 ML interatomic potentials finds lightweight models are the practical choice Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have become one of the fastest-growing tools in computational materials science. They promise the accuracy of density functional theory (DFT) at a fraction of the cost, in principle. But the field has seen an arms race in […]

China announces plans for space-ground asteroid early-warning network The China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced on International Asteroid Day, June 30, plans for a comprehensive space-ground asteroid early-warning network, a system combining ground-based telescopes, deep-space radar, and orbital assets that could dramatically accelerate the discovery and tracking of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. The announcement, reported […]

Reinforcement learning continuously controls quantum error correction on Google’s Willow processor Quantum error correction is the central challenge standing between today’s noisy quantum processors and the fault-tolerant quantum computers needed for practical applications. Correcting errors is one thing; keeping the correction system stable as the hardware drifts over time, a near-inevitable consequence of real physical […]

Frost spreads more slowly on superhydrophobic surfaces via suspended ‘ice bridges’ Frost is a familiar nuisance, on car windshields, refrigerator coils, aircraft wings and heat exchangers, but the physics of how it spreads has an important subtlety that engineers may now be able to exploit. A study published earlier this year in Nature Physics and […]

Softer ovaries extend the fertility window in rats, IL-11 blockade reduces stiffness, doubles conception As women age, their ovaries become progressively stiffer. With that stiffness comes a decline in follicle development, hormone production, and ultimately fertility, a process that, for most women, culminates in menopause around age 50. A team from Tongji Medical College at […]

LLM predictions match human forecasters for social science experiments, but overestimate effect sizes Can a large language model predict the outcome of a social science experiment before it is run? According to a study published July 8 in Nature by Ashwini Ashokkumar (Harvard), Luke Hewitt (Stanford/Transluce), Isaias Ghezae (Harvard), and Robb Willer (Stanford), the answer […]

Decision-making engages a recurrent loop between auditory cortex and prefrontal cortex, not a one-way street Classical models of cortical processing describe a hierarchical system: sensory information flows forward from primary sensory areas to higher-order association regions, where decisions are computed. A new study published July 8 in Nature Communications by Franco Giarrocco and Bruno B. […]

Lateral force microscopy reveals subsurface atomic vacancies in MoS₂, overturning a long-held assumption By Marie, science journalist for 1ban.news For decades, lateral force microscopy (LFM), a scanning probe technique that measures frictional forces at the nanoscale, was thought to be sensitive only to the very topmost atomic layer. Subsurface features, it was assumed, were invisible […]