Science

Converting carbon dioxide into useful fuels and chemicals at industrial scale requires overcoming a fundamental chemical challenge: the CO₂ molecule is extremely stable, and breaking its carbon-oxygen bonds demands energy. High-temperature electrolysis, running the reaction at 800°C in a solid oxide cell, has long offered a theoretical path to efficiency, but the catalysts that accelerate […]

The Perseids, peaking around August 13, are the summer’s marquee meteor shower, and this year conditions are near-perfect: a new moon on August 12 means a dark sky for the Perseid peak on the 13th. But there are other meteor showers between mid-July and late August worth knowing about, even if, in some cases, moonlight […]

Cryo-electron microscopy has transformed structural biology over the past decade, but the software that sharpens and enhances the raw density maps has a blind spot: it offers no way to know which parts of the enhanced map are reliable. A neural network can turn noise into apparent structure, and the user has no way to […]

Boolean satisfiability, the SAT problem, is the engine beneath a vast range of computing tasks, from chip verification to cybersecurity to formal proof checking. The algorithms that solve it have been refined by human experts over decades, incrementally improving performance through clever heuristics for variable selection, clause reduction, and restart timing. A study published in […]

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) has blocked the publication of a planned editorial and seven opinion articles in its flagship journal Diabetes Care that would have addressed the controversial removal of the journal’s editor-in-chief from the association’s annual meeting in June, according to new reporting from Ars Technica published July 17. The development represents a […]

A man who had testicular tissue removed and frozen at age 10, before chemotherapy for sickle-cell disease, has had his ability to produce sperm restored after the tissue was transplanted back into his body 16 years later. The procedure, presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in London and published […]

A large prospective study published in Nature Communications on July 18 has quantified, for the first time in children, exactly how antibody levels correlate with the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The findings offer a biological measure that could guide booster timing, variant-specific vaccine updates, and risk assessment as the virus continues to evolve. The study, […]

The European Commission has proposed slowing the rate at which the cap on carbon pollution permits is lowered under the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), and extending free permits for industry until 2038, a four-year delay from the previously planned 2034 phase-out. The proposal, reported by BBC News, marks the first time the EU has […]

Aircraft wings have gotten steadily longer and thinner over the past 70 years, but there is a limit. Beyond a certain aspect ratio, a conventional cantilever wing, attached only at the fuselage, cannot support itself. The solution may be a truss: a diagonal strut connecting the fuselage to the underside of the wing, sharing the […]

The probability of a very strong El Niño event has surged to 81%, according to NOAA’s latest ENSO diagnostic update issued on July 9, an 18-point jump from the 63% forecast just one month earlier. That single number, combined with unprecedented model agreement, has climatologists warning that the 2026-2027 El Niño could be the strongest […]