General science & research news
On paper, the Champlain Hudson Power Express was a triumph of vision and patience. Fifteen years of planning. A decade of permitting. Four years of construction snaking 546 kilometers (339 miles) underground and underwater from the Canadian border to the heart of Queens. A price tag of $6 billion, privately financed by Blackstone and Hydro-Quebec. […]
What does it mean to be a particle? In classical physics, the answer is straightforward. A particle is a tiny object with a definite location, a definite boundary, and a definite identity. You can cut it in two. You can take half away. The halves are smaller particles, but the basic idea holds. Quantum field […]
The standard way to insert a gene into a human cell requires breaking both strands of the DNA double helix at a precise location. The cell, sensing catastrophe, rushes to repair the damage, and if the right donor template is nearby, it sometimes uses that template to patch the break, incorporating the new genetic material. […]
In June 2026, as hundreds of Midwesterners began showing up at emergency rooms with the explosive diarrhea, cramping, and fatigue that mark a Cyclospora infection, something unusual happened. State health departments caught the outbreak first. They always do in the early days. But this time, the gap between what states knew and what the CDC […]
A New Golden Age or a Brazen Power Grab? Inside the White House Plan to Overhaul American Science On July 21, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, delivered a 90-page report to President Trump titled “Science: A New Golden Age.” It is not an incremental document. It explicitly […]
Vancomycin, one of the most powerful antibiotics ever developed, is losing the battle against Enterococcus faecium. The bacterium, which causes hospital-acquired infections that can be fatal in immunocompromised patients, has evolved resistance to vancomycin so consistently that clinicians in many settings consider the drug a last resort that no longer works. The standard response to […]
The human heart beats roughly 100,000 times each day without pause, adjusting its rhythm second by second whether you are asleep, sprinting, or being startled by a loud noise. For decades, scientists assumed this tireless performance depended entirely on commands sent from the brain through the autonomic nervous system. The heart, in this view, was […]
An experimental oral vaccine against Shigella sonnei prevented 89% of shigellosis cases in a deliberately-infected group of American adults, according to a phase 2 trial published June 30 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. It is the strongest efficacy signal yet reported for a live-attenuated Shigella vaccine, in a field that has produced no licensed product […]
When New Horizons awoke from its longest hibernation on June 23, 2026, the spacecraft was 5.9 billion miles from Earth, 64 astronomical units, or 64 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Every status report during the 321-day sleep was green. The probe was healthy, its power levels adequate, its instruments intact. Mission […]
When a fruit fly locks onto the smell of fermenting fruit, it does not simply follow its nose upwind. New research published in Nature reveals that Drosophila employs a sophisticated two-state navigational strategy, tracking the edge of an odor plume rather than its center, and using directional memory to guide returns after each exit. The […]
