Science

Spatial transcriptomics has given biologists something they have wanted for decades: the ability to look at a slice of tissue and see, with genome-wide precision, which genes are turned on at every location. The technology is transformative for fields from developmental biology to cancer research, revealing how cells organize themselves into tissues, how tumors remodel […]

Spatial transcriptomics has given biologists something they have wanted for decades: the ability to look at a slice of tissue and see, with genome-wide precision, which genes are turned on at every location. The technology is transformative for fields from developmental biology to cancer research, revealing how cells organize themselves into tissues, how tumors remodel […]

In an era when artificial intelligence labs race to build ever larger models trained on ever vaster datasets, a sobering result has emerged from one of the most comprehensive head-to-head evaluations ever conducted in computational pathology. Size, it turns out, is not destiny. A team led by Stanford University and Argonne National Laboratory has systematically […]

Every language has an alphabet. English gets by with 26 letters. Mandarin builds tens of thousands of characters from a finite set of strokes. Music in the Western tradition arranges 12 notes into everything from a Gregorian chant to a Mahler symphony. Constraint, properly understood, is not the enemy of creativity. It is its engine. […]

Tooth enamel is the hardest tissue in the human body. It has to be. Every day, it withstands chewing forces measured in hundreds of Newtons, temperature swings from ice cream to hot coffee, and the constant chemical assault of acidic foods and bacterial waste. A single human molar can bear loads exceeding 700 Newtons, roughly […]

For nearly three millennia, readers have approached Homer’s Odyssey as a work of literature, a cornerstone of the Western canon filled with gods, monsters, and heroic adventures. But a growing body of interdisciplinary research suggests that the epic is something more: a scientific document that encodes genuine Bronze Age knowledge about metallurgy, pharmacology, and the […]

When Hong Wang was six years old, her father, a schoolteacher in the emerald-hilled city of Guilin, China, showed her a puzzle at the end of a math textbook chapter. How should you plant seven trees to get the greatest number of rows of three trees? The problem is a classic exercise in incidence geometry: […]

The consent form that Mei’s parents signed in January 2025 was eight pages long. It described an experimental adenine base-editing therapy for their six-year-old daughter’s rare genetic condition. It listed potential side effects: fever, headache, nausea, injection site reactions. It warned of the unknown. It promised that all costs would be covered by the sponsor, […]

Consider this: every language you have ever heard, every tongue spoken by every person alive today, represents a rounding error. Of the roughly 7,500 languages spoken or signed across the planet right now, almost all are the survivors of a vast, quiet extinction event that has been underway for millennia. A study published July 23, […]

In the final months of 2019, the world had no idea it was about to be blindsided. As SARS-CoV-2 began its silent spread through Wuhan, the global scientific community was operating nearly blind when it came to understanding which viruses were circulating in wildlife and which among them carried the molecular keys to unlock human […]