General science & research news
In the band of sky between roughly 150 and 300 kilometers (93 to 186 miles) above the Earth, the atmosphere is both the enemy and the answer. It is dense enough to drag any satellite down within weeks if left unchecked, which is why almost nobody operates there. But that same thin air could be […]
About five kilometers (three miles) off the coast of Mazara del Vallo in western Sicily, in 46 meters (151 feet) of water, lies a Roman merchant ship that has not moved in roughly 2,100 years. Its cargo is still on board: about 500 amphorae, the sturdy clay jars of antiquity, packed for a voyage that […]
Every particle ever found has been made of matter: quarks and leptons, bound together by forces. On August 5, at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil, an experiment announced the closest physics has come to breaking that rule. The BESIII Collaboration at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider reported that the dominant constituent […]
The RNA inside a cell carries a second layer of information. More than 170 different chemical modifications decorate its building blocks, editing how RNA folds, how efficiently it is translated, how quickly it degrades, and how cells respond to stress. This so-called epitranscriptome is implicated in neurological disorders, cancer, immune disease, and drug resistance, yet […]
Measles elimination in Europe has a weakest link, and it is Romania. The country has been endemic for the virus since 2015-16, a status the World Health Organization reaffirmed in September 2025. In 2025 Romania accounted for roughly 55 percent of all measles cases reported across the European Union, and of the EU’s 23 recorded […]
Energy storage has always involved a trade-off. Capacitors charge in seconds and cycle almost indefinitely but store little; batteries store far more but charge slowly and wear out. A team from Zhejiang University and the National University of Singapore has built an electrode material that combines both modes: a molecular cage that stores energy capacitively […]
The stratosphere is the least familiar layer of the atmosphere: too high for weather, too low for space, a region most people encounter only when a long-haul flight levels off. Yet a new study shows that one dramatic event in this remote layer, a sudden stratospheric warming, rearranges water across an entire continent for two […]
On July 28, Uganda’s Ministry of Health declared the country free of its Ebola outbreak, 42 days after the last confirmed locally transmitted case tested negative and was discharged from care. The announcement, reported in The Lancet, came with a warning: the same virus, Bundibugyo ebolavirus, continues to spread across the border in the Democratic […]
The Marmot Project in Crested Butte, Colorado, is one of the oldest continuous mammal studies on Earth. Since 1962, researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have tracked individual yellow-bellied marmots, recording who mates with whom, who survives which winter, and how the colony responds to a changing climate. Only Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research has […]
The most sensitive magnetic-field sensors ever built have a serious logistical problem. Superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) only work near absolute zero and need elaborate cryogenics. Atomic magnetometers of the spin-exchange relaxation-free (SERF) type demand near-perfect shielding from external magnetic interference. Both constraints push the sensor away from whatever it is trying to measure, which […]
