Science

The conventional wisdom about placebos has held for decades: they only work if the patient doesn’t know. Deception, the thinking goes, is essential to the effect. A study published March 21 in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology challenges that assumption with data from 90 healthy older adults. Researchers at Universita Cattolica del […]

Daniel J. Baker had a problem that vexed CAR T cell researchers for years: among the thousands of proteins on the surface of cancer cells, which one could serve as a universal target across the many forms the disease takes? The answer, published June 25 in Cell, came not from a decade of painstaking laboratory […]

A human brain begins as a single cell. Nine months later, it contains roughly 170 billion cells, neurons and glia, each in the correct place, each performing the right function. How that staggering increase in scale does not lead to chaos is one of developmental biology’s oldest questions. The classical answer, proposed by Lewis Wolpert […]

A study published June 16 in Genomic Psychiatry by researchers at Tel Aviv University demonstrates that the amount of drug reaching the brain can vary dramatically depending on where a woman is in her menstrual cycle, and that this variability may have been masking real drug efficacy for decades. The researchers, led by Jason Blatt […]

Neisseria gonorrhoeae has developed resistance to virtually every antibiotic ever deployed against it. Even the newest oral drugs, zoliflodacin and gepotidacin, the first new classes in over 30 years, are expected to face resistance within 5 to 10 years. A study published June 17 in Science Translational Medicine from the lab of James J. Collins […]

Update to our June 25 report on Europe’s extreme heat wave. The following developments have emerged since the morning article. The heat wave gripping Western Europe intensified sharply on June 24, with the United Kingdom recording its hottest June day in history, 36.1 °C (97 °F) in Gosport, Hampshire, beating the previous June record of […]

A team at Imperial College London has engineered bacteriophages, viruses that normally infect bacteria, to deliver a malaria antigen directly to tumor cells, redirecting pre-existing vaccine-induced immunity to destroy cancer. In mice with established colorectal tumors, the approach produced durable complete remissions in 44 percent of animals, with no detectable toxicity. The work, published in […]

The oldest known asteroid impact site on Earth has been confirmed in Western Australia’s Pilbara Craton, pushing back the oldest recorded impact by more than half a billion years. The Miralga Impact Structure, preserved as the 35-kilometer-wide North Pole Dome, has been dated to 3.02 billion years ago by a team led by Chris Kirkland […]

A clock on the Moon runs about 56 microseconds per day faster than an identical clock on Earth. That is not a theoretical curiosity, it is a practical problem for a future in which dozens of countries, private companies, and possibly hundreds of people are operating on and around the Moon. Without a shared time […]

The Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 17, has now reached 1,118 confirmed cases and 291 fatalities in the DRC, with 20 additional cases and 2 deaths in Uganda, making it the third-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. Next week, […]