General science & research news
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 […]
A team of researchers in Barcelona has developed a device that can revive eyes from deceased donors, restoring their electrical responsiveness to light up to 10 hours after death. The work, described in a preprint posted to bioRxiv on June 30, marks what independent experts call a “new frontier for retina preservation” and opens a […]
A submarine volcano in the Indian Ocean has brought to the surface material from Earth’s primordial magma ocean, molten rock that crystallized more than 4.46 billion years ago, within the first 100 million years of the planet’s history. The discovery, published July 1 in Nature, is the first direct evidence that remnants of the magma […]
A landmark analysis of more than 3,000 animal bones from Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores has upended two decades of assumptions about the behavior of Homo floresiensis, the tiny hominin nicknamed “the hobbit.” The study, published July 3 in Science Advances, finds that H. floresiensis was a scavenger that fed on […]
France recorded 2,025 excess deaths during the last week of June, Sante Publique France reported on July 3, as the country emerged from its most severe early-summer heatwave on record. Deaths rose 29 percent nationally in the week of June 22-28 compared to baseline, with the Paris region (Ile-de-France) seeing a 62 percent increase. The […]
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) affects approximately one in seven pregnancies worldwide, increasing risks of preterm birth, cesarean delivery, and long-term metabolic disease for both mother and child. The standard approach, dietary modification, glucose monitoring and insulin when necessary, is reactive rather than preventive. An underlying trigger that could be addressed early has remained elusive. A […]
The Palladin Institute of Biochemistry in Kyiv, the first dedicated biochemistry research institute in the former Soviet Union, founded in 1925 by Oleksandr Palladin, has suffered catastrophic damage in the overnight Russian strikes on Kyiv on July 1-2, 2026. Two of the institute’s four buildings were ruined in two attack waves around midnight and 5:30 […]
The June 2026 heatwave that broke temperature records across Europe also exacted a staggering human toll, according to a preliminary statistical estimate released on June 30. Christopher Callahan of Indiana University Bloomington estimates that approximately 20,390 excess deaths occurred across Europe during the week of June 22–28, a single-week mortality burden comparable to entire summer […]
For patients with both end-stage kidney disease and terminal bladder dysfunction, the standard of care has historically been kidney transplantation combined with urinary diversion, rerouting urine through segments of intestine, which brings risks of infection, metabolic disturbances, and reduced quality of life. A transplant that includes the bladder itself has been a surgical aspiration, but […]
