Science

Evolution is a blind climber, and the landscape it navigates is treacherous. A protein under evolutionary pressure can only mutate one step at a time. Each change that makes it better at its job must also leave it stable enough to fold, soluble enough to function, and cooperative enough to survive in a cell. Natural […]

A fruit fly has about 200,000 neurons in its central nervous system. A human has roughly 86 billion. That difference in scale is obvious, but a deeper puzzle hides beneath it: given that neural stem cells (known as neuroblasts in insects) are also vastly fewer in number, how does a limited pool of progenitor cells […]

What if the most useful thing AlphaFold3 can tell you about a protein-DNA complex is not where every atom sits, but how likely each pair of atoms is to touch? That question drove a team of researchers from East China Normal University and Peking University to build ContactSeek, a computational framework published today in Nature […]

In Lake Memphremagog, which straddles the Vermont-Quebec border, a third of the brown bullhead catfish carry malignant melanomas. The tumours are black, invasive, and frequently metastatic. And they are not independent cancers. Whole-genome sequencing has now confirmed that every tumour in every fish shares a single clonal origin, making this only the fourth naturally occurring […]

In chemistry, the most interesting journeys are not always the ones that end somewhere new. A proton that departs its starting position, migrates across a molecular interface, and returns to exactly the same atom it left sounds like a futile round trip. But a new study published in Nature Materials by researchers at the Dalian […]

TV shrinks your brain. Reading does not. For years, the public health message about sitting has been simple: sit less. Stand more. Move. The assumption was that the health risk of sedentary behavior came from the inactivity itself, that your body does not care whether you are watching television or reading a book, as long […]

A solar panel for the retina: how subretinal implants restore vision where drugs cannot Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of irreversible blindness in the developed world, affecting more than 5 million people globally. In its advanced form, geographic atrophy, the light-sensitive cells of the central retina die off, leaving a blind spot […]

What a stranded whale’s stomach tells us about the ocean’s invisible microbes Pygmy sperm whales are among the most elusive animals on Earth. They spend their days in the deep ocean, diving hundreds of meters to hunt squid, surfacing only briefly, and traveling in small groups that are almost impossible to track. The species Kogia […]

Southern Ocean is getting saltier, defying a core climate prediction One of the most intuitive predictions of climate science is the “wet gets wetter, dry gets drier” paradigm. In the ocean, this translates to “salty gets saltier, fresh gets fresher”: as the hydrological cycle intensifies with global warming, high-evaporation subtropical regions should become saltier, while […]

The trip is the therapy: psilocybin’s brain changes outlast the psychedelic experience For years, one of the central questions in psychedelic research has been whether the subjective experience, the “trip” itself, is essential to therapeutic outcomes or merely a side effect that could be eliminated with a better drug. A new study from the University […]