Science

The same molecule, opposite effects: why coffee and energy drinks are not the same Caffeine is caffeine. It is a single molecule, 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, with a well-characterized mechanism: it blocks adenosine receptors, preventing the drowsiness signal from reaching the brain. A 250-milligram dose from a cup of coffee should, in principle, produce the same physiological effect […]

Cross-linking inside living cells: a new lens on how influenza commandeers us Every year, influenza A infects 3 to 5 million people worldwide and kills up to 650,000. For decades, virologists have studied how the virus hijacks human cells using the standard toolkit of molecular biology: break the cells open, extract the proteins, run the […]

Learning from pagodas: the skyscraper that sways with the wind instead of fighting it Tall buildings have a fundamental engineering problem: wind. As structures climb higher, the forces exerted by wind grow disproportionately, and the traditional solution, add more mass, thicker walls, larger dampers, becomes increasingly inefficient. The Burj Khalifa uses a tuned mass damper […]

Fingers in mouths: what ape hugs reveal about the ancient politics of trust In the animal kingdom, few gestures signal trust as vividly as a male chimpanzee sliding his finger into another male’s mouth. Chimpanzees are known to bite off fingers during fights. To place a digit voluntarily between the teeth of a potential rival […]

What drove Brazil’s Amazon fire collapse in 2025 The number is almost jarring in its scale: 3.1 million hectares burned in the Brazilian Amazon in 2025, down from 15.8 million hectares the year before. A drop of 80 percent. The lowest area burned since the MapBiomas monitoring network began satellite-based tracking in 1985. But the […]

A cooler Earth core solves a magnetic mystery Earth’s core may be about 1,000 degrees Celsius cooler than scientists have long believed, according to a new technique for measuring the temperature of molten iron under extreme pressures. The findings, presented July 17 at the Goldschmidt Conference in Montreal, do more than revise a number, they […]

The mouse gut virome: 109,000 viral genomes and the ageing signals bacteria miss The gut microbiome has been one of the most active frontiers in biomedicine over the past two decades, but the research has had a blind spot. Most studies focus on bacteria, the hundreds of species that live in the intestines and influence […]

Medical AI privacy: when average protection is no protection at all Moritz Knolle, a doctoral student at the Technical University of Munich, asked himself a question that led to an unsettling discovery: “I asked myself: would I contribute my data to train a medical AI model?” To answer it, he and his colleagues ran a […]

Genetics of a 4,000-year-old sacrifice: what Shimao reveals about power in ancient China About 80 human skulls were found near the East Gate of Shimao, a vast stone-walled settlement in northern Shaanxi, China, that flourished around 4,200 to 3,700 years ago. For a long time, archaeologists assumed most of them belonged to women. The assumption […]

The global search for oil and gas is moving into deeper water. Deep offshore investments are expected to exceed $200 billion in 2026, double the average of the past decade, and cumulative spending could reach $2.5 trillion by 2035. The question posed by a new analysis in Nature is not whether this drilling is necessary, […]