Science

Glioblastoma is among the most devastating of cancers: fewer than 30 percent of patients survive two years, and the standard treatment — surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy with temozolomide — has changed little in decades. A major barrier to progress has been physical. The blood-brain barrier, a tightly sealed network of endothelial cells, blocks nearly all […]

A drug originally developed for spinal cord injury has shown a surprising second act: it repairs DNA damage and reduces inflammation in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease — and it is already known to be safe in humans. KCL-286 (also known as C286) is a first-in-class, orally bioavailable small molecule that selectively activates retinoic […]

On July 16, 2024, a 53-kilogram (110-pound) meteoroid entered Earth’s atmosphere at 14.4 kilometers per second over the New York City metropolitan area, generating a bright daytime fireball and a sonic boom felt across five states. Most of the object disintegrated, but one large fragment crashed through the master bedroom ceiling of a home in […]

Ten years after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft revealed Pluto’s astonishingly varied surface, towering water-ice mountains, flowing nitrogen glaciers, and the vast heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia, scientists have found something else in the data: landslides. Six large-scale landslides have been identified for the first time on the dwarf planet, all located along the inner rims of three […]

An invasive beetle the size of a chia seed is quietly devastating urban forests across the globe, and new genetic evidence suggests it has arrived not once but at least six separate times. The polyphagous shot-hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus), native to China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, is an ambrosia beetle that bores into trees and introduces […]

Naked mole-rats are among the strangest mammals on Earth: they live underground in large colonies, exhibit temperature-dependent sex determination, and, most unusually for a mammal, operate with a eusocial structure reminiscent of ants or bees. A single queen monopolizes reproduction while all other females remain infertile, a system that has puzzled biologists since it was […]

Were ancient Egyptian princesses restricted to the palace, or did some of them draw a bowstring alongside their brothers? A new study of six royal skeletons from the Dashur pyramid complex, published July 17 in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, argues that pronounced muscle attachments on the arms and shoulders of several Middle Kingdom princesses are […]

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Merck’s oral PCSK9 inhibitor, the first pill in a drug class that has been available only as an injection since its introduction in 2015. The approval, announced July 16, marks a significant shift in how a key cholesterol-lowering therapy can be delivered and prescribed. PCSK9 inhibitors work […]

For decades, Huntington’s disease research has focused on one goal: lowering levels of the toxic huntingtin protein. The strategy made intuitive sense; the disease is caused by an expanded CAG trinucleotide repeat in the HTT gene that produces a misfolded, aggregation-prone protein, but the most prominent huntingtin-lowering therapy, tominersen, was halted in a Phase 3 […]

The Upton Lovell Shaman, buried 4,000 years ago near Stonehenge with an elaborate toolkit of gold-working implements and ritual objects, has long been described in museum displays as “a stout man.” The original excavator, William Cunnington, wrote in 1801 that “from the largeness of the bones, it appeared to be a stout man.” A bearded […]