General science & research news
When a study published in Science in February 2026 showed a striking pattern of Neanderthal DNA depletion on the X chromosome of modern humans, the media response was swift and romantic. Headlines announced that Neanderthal men “chose” or “had designs on” Homo sapiens women. But Ludovic Slimak, a CNRS archaeologist at the Center for Anthropobiology […]
The universe is a computer, and time is the process of it running. This is the core claim that Stephen Wolfram has been developing for more than four decades, and in a recent interview with New Scientist, the physicist and computational thinker made his most accessible case yet. “Time is the irreducible doing of computation,” […]
The discovery came almost as an afterthought. In the mid-1980s, researchers racing to understand high-temperature superconductors in copper-oxide ceramics noticed something odd. When the materials were too warm to superconduct, they didn’t behave like normal metals either. Their electrical resistance rose in a perfectly straight line with temperature, no curvature, no plateau, no deviation. Forty […]
Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is one of the deadliest cancers with a five-year survival rate below 6 percent. It initially responds well to standard chemotherapy with cisplatin and etoposide, but nearly every patient relapses with drug-resistant disease within months. The genetic drivers of that resistance have remained largely unknown. A team led by David […]
How long can humans live? The question has sparked one of the most contentious debates in longevity science. In a correspondence published in Nature on 7 July 2026, the original authors of a landmark 2016 paper have fired back at the latest wave of criticism, insisting that their evidence for a maximum human lifespan of […]
On 19 June 2026, wildlife veterinarians in New Zealand received the news they had been dreading. Highly pathogenic H5N1 (clade 2.3.4.4b) had been confirmed in a brown skua on a beach in Western Australia. Within weeks, six other birds along roughly 3,000 kilometers of Australia’s southern coast tested positive, including several giant petrels. For New […]
More than three decades after Peter Shor published the algorithm that bears his name, the question of when, not if, a large-scale quantum computer will break much of the world’s encryption has shifted from theoretical to logistical. In an interview with New Scientist at the Quantum.Tech World conference in Boston, Shor offered a characteristically clear-eyed […]
When a researcher uses a large language model to help write a paper, the AI often leaves telltale traces. Words like “delve,” “underscore,” “intricate,” and “pivotal” cluster at rates far higher than in human-written text. Sentence structures follow predictable patterns. Openers like “In recent years…” and transitional phrases like “not just X, but Y” flag […]
The antimicrobial resistance crisis has a well-known bottleneck: the discovery pipeline. Traditional screening methods are slow, expensive, and have produced few viable candidates for clinical use. A team at the University of California, Davis has now demonstrated a generative AI approach that may accelerate the process dramatically. ARCADIAMP, Antimicrobial Rapid Candidate Generation through AI-driven Diffusion […]
What if time is not a fundamental feature of the universe, but something that emerges from the relationships between quantum systems? Giovanni Barontini, a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham, has built a tabletop experiment that suggests exactly that. Using approximately 24,000 ultracold rubidium-87 atoms cooled to billionths of a degree above absolute […]
