Science

Modeling extreme weather events, the kind that cause the most damage, is computationally intensive. A 1-in-100-year heatwave requires at least 100 simulated years to generate even a single example by brute force. With high-resolution climate models, the computing time and energy cost associated with such a simulation would be measured in months or years, even […]

Speaking more than one language is associated with brains that appear biologically younger, by about six years for bilinguals, seven for trilinguals, and up to 13 for quadrilinguals, according to research presented in Barcelona at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026. The findings, reported by The Guardian on July 6, add to […]

The standard cholesterol test that millions of Americans receive each year, the LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) measurement, may not be the best tool for deciding who should take statins. A simulation study published April 8 in JAMA compared three different blood tests for guiding lipid-lowering therapy in primary prevention and concluded that the apolipoprotein B (apoB) […]

The 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and caused more than $200 billion in damage. The earthquake was a magnitude 9.1, far larger than Japanese seismic hazard models had predicted for the Japan Trench, and the tsunami it generated was devastating because the seafloor rupture propagated all the way to the surface. […]

Editor’s note: This is an opinion article. In the early 2010s, when CRISPR-Cas9 first demonstrated that editing the human genome could be done with relative ease, the ethical debate was dominated by a single question: is it safe? The fear was that off-target edits, unintended mutations, and unanticipated developmental effects made human germline editing an […]

For decades, the mechanism by which Alzheimer’s disease kills neurons has been frustratingly incomplete. Known cell-death pathways, apoptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, can account for some neuronal loss, but not all. A significant fraction of brain cells simply seem to vanish, leaving no clear molecular signature of how they died. Researchers at King’s College London have now […]

Physicists at Shanxi University in Taiyuan, China, have demonstrated the first experimental observation of non-adiabatic non-Abelian braiding using quantum matter waves. The achievement, published July 3 in Nature Communications, opens a fast paradigm for braiding operations that could have implications for topological quantum computing and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics. Think of braiding like interweaving […]

The remains of two wolves found in a cave on the remote Swedish island of Stora Karlsö are challenging assumptions about the earliest human-wolf relationships. The wolves, dated to between 3,000 and 5,000 years old, could only have reached the island by boat, and their bones tell a story of human provisioning, possible care, and […]

A personalized dendritic cell vaccine called ZSNeo-DC has produced promising early results in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma (GBM), the most aggressive form of brain cancer. In a Phase Ib trial published July 4 in Nature Communications, all 11 patients receiving the vaccine were alive at 12 months, and median progression-free survival reached 16.2 months, […]

Super Typhoon Bavi made landfall on Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands on July 5, battering the US Pacific territories with sustained winds of approximately 290 km/h (180 mph) and gusts reaching 350 km/h (217 mph). The western eyewall of the storm passed directly over Rota, the southernmost inhabited island of the Northern Mariana Islands […]