Science

For biologists analyzing RNA sequencing data, the choice between edgeR and DESeq2, the two most widely used tools for differential gene expression analysis, has often been a matter of personal preference or institutional habit. A new study published in PLOS ONE suggests that the choice matters more than many researchers assume. The study, led by […]

A bold plan to transform one of America’s largest primate research facilities into a sanctuary — a move that would have been unprecedented in the history of U.S. biomedical research — appears to have stalled, though whether it is truly dead remains a matter of sharp disagreement. The Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) at […]

The proliferation of antibiotic resistance is often framed as a problem of clinical antibiotic overuse. But a growing body of evidence points to a less visible driver: agricultural practices. A new study published in Nature Communications shows that the diversity of pesticides applied to soil — not just their presence — actively enriches antibiotic resistance […]

A person’s genetic risk for obesity might feel like a fixed sentence, but a new randomized controlled trial suggests it does not determine how well diet-based weight loss works. The GENEROOS study, published in Nature Communications, found that adults in the top 5% of the BMI polygenic score distribution lost just as much weight through […]

Richard Feynman loved a good puzzle. In his 1985 memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he described a thought experiment that would bedevil physicists for decades: if you submerge an S-shaped lawn sprinkler and suck water in instead of spraying it out, which way does it rotate? The answer, it turns out, is that it […]

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company with a valuation approaching $1 trillion, has discovered something unusual inside its language model Claude: a hidden internal space filled with words that never appear in the model’s output but seem to influence how it reasons through problems. They call it “J-space.” The discovery has generated significant attention, and […]

About 10% of humans are left-handed. The proportion is remarkably consistent across time and continents. Yet the origin of handedness has remained one of biology’s most persistent puzzles — not because answers are scarce, but because they keep pointing to unexpected places. The most surprising finding, emerging from a convergence of developmental biology and genetics, […]

The eastern Pacific gray whale was once considered a conservation success story. Recovered from near-extinction after the end of commercial whaling, the population surged to roughly 27,000 animals by 2016. Now, a decade later, that number has been cut in half — and scientists say this time is different. The population estimate for 2025 stands […]

A new AI system can generate entire languages from scratch, complete with phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The question is whether that counts as creative. ConlangCrafter, developed by a team led by linguist Gasper Begus at the University of California, Berkeley, uses a multi-hop LLM pipeline to produce constructed languages (conlangs) with consistent internal grammar […]

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is planning to expropriate approximately US$500 million from three of its eight scientific directorates, rescinding funding for more than 100 research proposals that had already passed peer review, to fund an initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), according to a report published July […]