Science

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, […]

The central dogma of molecular biology, that DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is translated into protein according to the genetic code, carries a quiet assumption: that the ribosome reads the code correctly, producing exactly the protein the gene specifies. A study published June 24 in Nature by researchers at Northeastern University, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and […]

A Herculaneum papyrus scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, so fragile that any attempt to physically unroll it would reduce it to ash, has been completely virtually unwrapped for the first time, yielding more than a meter of continuous text. The breakthrough, announced at a conference in Naples on June […]

A paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal proposes that an intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 10,000 solar masses orbits the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and that this hidden companion may solve a longstanding puzzle about the Galactic Center’s young star populations. The authors, led by Xiaochen Zheng […]

The Perseverance rover has detected macromolecular carbon, large, cross-linked networks of reduced organic material, at multiple locations across the floor of Jezero Crater, according to a study published June 24 in Science Advances. The detection, made by the SHERLOC instrument (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) on the rover’s robotic […]

One of the most fundamental assumptions in modern cosmology is that the universe, when viewed at sufficiently large scales, looks the same in every direction. This principle of isotropy, a cornerstone of the standard ΛCDM cosmological model, predicts that any directional irregularities in galaxy distributions should fade beyond about 100 megaparsecs (roughly 326 million light-years). […]

The classic narrative of Neanderthal extinction goes like this: as modern humans expanded across Europe, small, isolated Neanderthal populations suffered from inbreeding and progressive genetic deterioration until they simply faded away. A study published June 24 in Nature by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology turns that story on its head, at […]

The hottest structural materials we have, nickel-based superalloys used in jet engines, melt around 1,500 °C. For applications operating above 2,000 °C, designers have had to choose between brittle ceramics and intermetallics on one hand, or refractory metals that oxidize and weaken rapidly on the other. A paper published June 24 in Nature from Xi’an […]

Attention is generally thought of as a function of the prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved region of the mammalian brain. But a study published in Nature Communications by researchers at Johns Hopkins University identifies a group of neurons in the brainstem, one of the oldest parts of the vertebrate brain, that plays a critical […]

On June 23, 2026, France recorded its hottest day since 1947. Temperatures exceeded 44 °C (111 °F) in parts of the country. By 11:45 pm on June 22, the Golfech nuclear reactor in southern France had already shut down. A second reactor at Nogent-sur-Seine was ramping down. Across the English Channel, five gas plants in […]