Science

The Green Revolution saved a billion lives. It also made people less nourished. That uncomfortable trade-off, yield at the expense of nutritional quality, is the starting point for a sweeping review published in Nature on June 24. Fifteen plant scientists from 14 institutions across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States argue that the tools […]

The mRNA vaccines that turned the COVID-19 pandemic worked with astonishing speed and efficacy. But the molecular details of why they work so well remain surprisingly incomplete. The lipid nanoparticle is not a passive delivery vehicle, it is a potent adjuvant in its own right. The mRNA is not immunologically silent despite its nucleoside modifications. […]

A team of researchers from Nanjing University and Tsinghua University has demonstrated a fundamentally new way to cool nanoscale devices using nothing more than a laser beam and a pair of atomically thin semiconductor layers. The approach, described in Nature on June 24, creates a temperature difference of more than 100 kelvin across a gap […]

How many times does a link need to be disproven before it stops being treated as an open question? The latest answer comes from Hong Kong, where researchers analyzed more than 700,000 mother-child pairs and found, once again, no association between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism or ADHD in children. The study, published June […]

The National Institutes of Health is heading toward one of the most constrained grant-award years in recent memory. By mid-June 2026, with roughly three months left in the fiscal year, the agency had awarded only about 5,000 new and competitive renewal grants, compared with 9,000 to 10,000 in a typical pre-2025 year. The projected shortfall […]

The nitrate problem in the world’s groundwater is not going away anytime soon, even if farmers stopped using nitrogen fertilizer tomorrow. A new study published in Nature Communications by Wen Zhao, Xiaoxu Jia, and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an international team of collaborators has produced the first comprehensive global estimate of […]

For the better part of a decade, the trajectory of artificial intelligence followed a simple formula: take a larger neural network, feed it more text, and watch performance improve. The scaling laws were remarkably predictable, until they were not. As building bigger and better chatbots gets harder, more expensive, and yields diminishing returns, a growing […]

The deuteron is the simplest atomic nucleus in existence: one proton and one neutron bound by the strong nuclear force. Its very simplicity is what makes it valuable to physicists. In a system with only two particles, theoretical predictions can be made with unusually high precision, and any deviation from those predictions becomes a clear […]

On Feb. 2, 2026, Nature Medicine published a paper that seemed to offer one of the simplest and cheapest ways to improve outcomes for lung cancer patients: just treat them before 3:00 PM. The study, LungTIME-C01, reported that patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who received immunochemotherapy in the morning or early afternoon had […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has appointed eight new members to its Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC), the panel that advises the agency on which bulk drug substances compounding pharmacies are allowed to use. A review by STAT News, CNN, and the Associated Press has found that the vast majority of the new appointees […]