Science

In May 1994, an Egyptologist named Bob Brier and an anatomist named Ronn Wade began what no one had attempted in roughly 2,000 years: mummifying a modern human body using exclusively ancient Egyptian tools and techniques. The body belonged to a 76-year-old Baltimore man who had died of a heart attack and donated his remains […]

The standard way to measure cooling demand, counting how many degrees the temperature rises above a baseline, then summing those degrees over a season, has a fundamental blind spot: it treats a 30-degree humid day the same as a 30-degree dry day. A new study in Nature Communications shows that blind spot matters, and that […]

Two quantum sensing technologies, optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, are transforming how chemists and materials scientists measure the otherwise invisible, according to a comprehensive new review posted on arXiv by researchers at Harvard University and Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The review, led by Piotr Put (Harvard/Jagiellonian), Arjun Pillai, Xuan Hoang […]

Science is often presented as a universal endeavor, guided by curiosity and logic rather than politics. But a sweeping new quantitative analysis of roughly 80 million publications from 1970 to 2023 tells a different story, one in which geopolitical shocks, national priorities, and deep structural inequalities between the Global North and South shape what gets […]

Are we in the midst of a male reproductive crisis? The question has generated one of the most polarized debates in modern reproductive science, and a major investigation by The Guardian’s science correspondent Hannah Devlin provides the most comprehensive portrait yet of the evidence, the personalities, and the politics driving it. The alarmist case The […]

A team of researchers from Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University has shown that a concept borrowed from ecology, critical slowing down, can predict when a drone is about to lose control due to incremental damage, well before any visible signs of instability. The study, published in PNAS, represents the first application of critical […]

Researchers at Southeast University and HiNa Battery Technology in China have developed a sodium metal battery that can charge fully in four minutes and retain 90% of its capacity over 2,000 cycles, performance that, if scaled, could reshape the economics of electric vehicle batteries. The key innovation, published in Nano-Micro Letters, is a tin-based quasi-solid […]

A multi-institutional collaboration led by Tongji University has identified the key factors governing oxygen evolution in LiOH-based nonaqueous lithium-oxygen batteries, and shown that a systematic approach to catalyst, electrolyte and current collector design can boost oxygen recovery from near zero to approximately 75%. The study, published in Nature Communications, addresses one of the fundamental challenges […]

Researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Huawei Technologies have designed an FPGA-based sparse Ising machine that solves combinatorial optimization problems up to 68 times faster than previous FPGA implementations, by doing something surprisingly straightforward: treating sparse problems as sparse. The study, published in Nature Communications, targets the Max-Cut problem, an […]

A team led by Christian Drosten’s group at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin has published the first systematic experimental and genomic evaluation of a prominent hypothesis linking the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site to a laboratory-adapted MERS coronavirus strain, and the results are unequivocal: the data do not support the proposed connection. The study, published in […]