Science

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 […]

When temperatures rise, plants respond with a suite of morphological changes, stems elongate, leaves lift and thin, flowering accelerates. This process, called thermomorphogenesis, is critical for survival in warming conditions but becomes harmful if uncontrolled: excessive stem elongation wastes resources and increases the risk of lodging in crops. A study published July 4 in Nature […]

The sense of smell has been called “the bestial sense”, Paul Broca’s 19th-century dismissal that, according to researchers, led to decades of scientific neglect. But the experience of millions who lost their sense of smell during the COVID-19 pandemic has changed that. Of roughly 780 million reported COVID-19 cases globally, approximately 60 percent experienced smell […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected abundant complex organic carbon in mudstones on the floor of Jezero Crater, the most robust detection of organic matter on Mars outside Gale Crater. The finding, published June 24 in Science Advances and reported this week by Ars Technica, is both encouraging and inconclusive: the carbon could be the remains […]

The brain learns to recognize familiar objects at two very different speeds: the rapid adaptation that occurs within minutes of seeing something new, and the gradual consolidation that builds over days into durable recognition. A study published July 4 in Nature Communications shows these two timescales are driven by fundamentally different mechanisms in the primate […]

On July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, the known universe was small. Five planets were recognized (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). The heliocentric model was settled. The Milky Way was a diffuse ribbon across the sky. And for all anyone knew, that ribbon was the entire cosmos. Two hundred and fifty […]

Every time a cell divides, its entire genome, three billion base pairs in humans, must be duplicated with near-perfect fidelity. That process begins with an enzyme called DNA primase, which lays down short RNA primers that DNA polymerases need to start copying. How primase itself gets started has been a long-standing puzzle: it must select […]

Lacunar stroke accounts for roughly one in four of all ischemic strokes, approximately 35,000 cases per year in the UK alone. These small, deep brain infarcts are routinely treated with antiplatelet drugs such as aspirin and clopidogrel, on the assumption that they are caused by the same atherosclerotic plaque buildup that drives other types of […]

On November 12, 2025, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave observatories detected a signal unlike any they had seen before. Designated S251112cm, the merger had a chirp mass between 0.1 and 0.87 solar masses, far too light to be a pair of ordinary stellar-mass black holes, and with only an 8 percent probability of involving a neutron […]

A mission that seemed impossible just 10 months ago is now underway. On July 3, a small spacecraft called LINK launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands on the final flight of Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL rocket, beginning a daring effort to rescue NASA’s aging Swift Observatory from a decaying orbit. If successful, the […]