Science

The global food system is caught in a paradox: it produces enough calories for a growing population, yet contributes roughly a third of greenhouse gas emissions, drives deforestation, and leaves more than half the world’s population unable to afford or access healthy diets. The hidden costs of current food production have been estimated at US$10–20 […]

A team of researchers has discovered a vast, glassy lava field on the floor of the northwestern Atlantic Ocean that does not fit any existing model of volcanic eruptions. Named the Balerion Lava Field, after the black dragon from Game of Thrones, it may represent a previously unrecognized form of volcanism. The findings were presented […]

Chronic neuropathic pain, pain that persists long after the initial nerve injury has healed, is notoriously difficult to treat. Part of the problem is that the underlying biology is a moving target: the spinal cord rewires itself at the cellular and molecular level in response to persistent pain signals, and by the time a patient […]

For the past decade, the lithium-ion battery has been the undisputed king of energy storage, powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles to grid-scale storage farms. But lithium is expensive, geopolitically concentrated, and subject to volatile pricing. Its successor may be built from one of the most abundant and cheapest elements on Earth: sodium. In […]

Neptune’s largest moon Triton is one of the most enigmatic objects in the Solar System. A captured Kuiper belt object with a retrograde orbit, a thin nitrogen atmosphere, and geyser-like plumes, it has long been suspected of harboring a subsurface ocean. Now, new modeling by Tilke and colleagues, described in a News & Views article […]

The human brain is not a uniform sheet of identical circuits. It is molecularly, anatomically, and physiologically heterogeneous, different regions have different receptor densities, different cell types, and different connectivities. This variability has traditionally been treated as noise, something to average over when building models of large-scale brain dynamics. A new study published in PNAS […]

One of the hardest problems in quantum computing is keeping a qubit coherent long enough to perform useful operations. Environmental noise, magnetic fluctuations, temperature changes, stray electric fields, constantly pushes qubits toward decoherence. The standard approach is to use pulse sequences that cancel out low-frequency noise, but these sequences are often incompatible with the hardware […]

A team of Chinese physicists has identified and eliminated an invisible bottleneck in laser-driven proton acceleration: a subtle misalignment in the laser’s grating compressor, roughly the angular equivalent of 100 microradians, that was silently degrading performance by half. Published on arXiv and accepted by Matter and Radiation at Extremes, the study led by Qingfan Wu […]

The U.S. research community has responded to what it sees as an existential threat to the federal science enterprise with a record-breaking show of opposition. More than 340,000 comments were submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget by the July 13 deadline, including a 47-page response from the Association of American Universities, […]

The enteric nervous system, the vast mesh of neurons embedded in the walls of the gastrointestinal tract, is often called the “second brain.” It contains as many neurons as the spinal cord and operates largely autonomously, controlling digestion, nutrient absorption, and gut motility without input from the central nervous system. Yet how this complex circuit […]