Science

The number of industrial chemical accidents, explosions, and fires in the United States that resulted in chemical releases rose by 57 percent between 2021 and 2025, from 83 to 131, according to official statistics compiled by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB). Accidents involving injuries or fatalities rose from 60 to 89 over […]

Fireworks are synonymous with celebration, but after the colors fade and the smoke clears, they leave behind a chemical legacy that persists in the environment far longer than the spectacle itself. Three studies published by the American Chemical Society, released in conjunction with the U.S. Independence Day holiday, quantify the hidden pollution from fireworks across […]

One of the grand challenges in synthetic biology is building enzymes that do not exist in nature, and making them work inside living cells. Artificial enzymes, constructed by embedding synthetic catalytic cofactors into protein scaffolds, have been developed in test tubes for years. But the crowded, chemically complex environment of a living cell has proven […]

A growing number of Americans are injecting themselves with small chains of amino acids called peptides, synthetic or derived versions of naturally occurring molecules, purchased from online vendors, wellness clinics, and compounding pharmacies. The products are marketed for everything from tissue healing and muscle recovery to anti-aging and weight loss. But for most of these […]

Why do people make different choices when faced with the same options? Standard models of decision-making explain variability in terms of noisy evidence accumulation or shifting attention. But a study published July 4 in Nature Communications suggests a deeper source of variability: the spontaneous, sub-second fluctuations of neural activity that occur before we even see […]

A team of researchers in China and France has developed a compact optical sensor capable of detecting carbon dioxide at concentrations as low as 168 parts per trillion, roughly 2,500 times more sensitive than ambient atmospheric CO₂ levels. The device, described July 4 in Nature Communications, uses a whispering gallery mode microcavity, a tiny glass […]

Neural replay, the brain’s mechanism of briefly re-activating patterns of neural activity in the same sequence they occurred during a prior experience, has long been considered a hallmark of the hippocampus, tightly tied to spatial navigation and memory consolidation. A new technique developed by researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Daejeon, South […]

A study of nearly 1,000 children has identified a specific molecular signal consistently associated with the brain structural organization that underlies mathematical and reading abilities. The finding, published July 4 in Nature Communications, bridges a gap between molecular neurochemistry and the large-scale brain architecture that supports academic learning, and points to a potential target for […]

For patients with cancers driven by ATM kinase deficiency, a group that includes some breast, lung, and hematologic malignancies, the treatment landscape has been marked by a frustrating paradox. ATM-deficient tumors are inherently sensitive to certain classes of chemotherapy and targeted drugs, including topoisomerase I inhibitors and PARP inhibitors. Yet a subset of these tumors […]

Near the entrance of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, a postdoctoral researcher named Witold Morek kneels beside a brick-and-flint wall, scraping lichen into an envelope. Inside that lichen, invisible to the naked eye, are tardigrades, microscopic animals sometimes called water bears, famous for their ability to survive the vacuum of space, boiling heat, extreme […]