Science

Perimenopause — the years-long transition before menopause when hormone levels fluctuate wildly — has become a major topic on social media, with influencers and wellness brands urging women to recognize its symptoms and seek treatment. But according to a deeply skeptical analysis in MIT Technology Review, much of what is being sold as perimenopause science […]

In the first microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was not made of atoms or even protons and neutrons. It was a searing soup of quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter, so hot and dense that particles could not exist as individuals. That soup, called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), vanished within […]

The gene-editing revolution may be about to get a powerful upgrade — not from discovering a new natural enzyme, but from designing one from scratch. Researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, led by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, have used artificial intelligence to create synthetic versions of CRISPR enzymes that are more efficient […]

When Western archaeologists tell the story of how early humans spread across Asia, the Japanese archipelago typically appears as a footnote — if it appears at all. A new commentary in Nature Communications by Robin Dennell of the University of Exeter argues that this neglect is a major oversight. Japan, Dennell contends, has one of […]

A cup of coffee with artificial sweetener and a prescription antidepressant may interact in ways no one anticipated — not in your liver, but in your gut microbiome. A systematic study published in Molecular Systems Biology tested 39 commercially used sweeteners against 25 species of human gut bacteria and found that roughly 75% of them […]

One of the oldest objections to the “RNA World” hypothesis, the idea that life began with RNA rather than DNA or proteins, is that RNA seemed too simple to do the job. Built from only four chemically similar nucleotide subunits, RNA was considered incapable of folding into the large, diverse structures that proteins manage with […]

Wearable sensors have long faced a trade-off between functionality and visibility. Electrodes that reliably measure brain activity, muscle signals, or eye movements have typically required bulky components, conspicuous wiring, or conductive gel that leaves visible residue. For applications where appearance matters — patient monitoring, cognitive studies, or consumer health — this visibility barrier has limited […]

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 […]

“If the energy stops flowing, there’s no more you. There’s no more consciousness, there’s no more emotion, there’s no more life.” That is the starting point for Martin Picard, a psychologist and mitochondrial biologist at Columbia University, and the central claim of what he calls the “mitochondrial theory of mind.” It is an idea that […]

The scale of fraudulent research in cancer science may be far larger than previously estimated. A team of researchers from Queensland University of Technology, the University of Sydney, and CNRS in France has applied a fine-tuned BERT language model to screen 2,647,471 cancer research papers published between 1999 and 2024. The result: 261,245 papers, 9.87 […]