General science & research news
In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca led an estimated 46,000 soldiers, 37 war elephants, and thousands of horses across the Alps in 15 days. By the time they reached the Italian plain, roughly half the men were dead. What remained of the army went on to defeat Rome at the Battle of the Trebia, but the […]
Source: Wasserman, H.I., Chi, B., Bohm, K.A. et al. “High-throughput characterization of transcription factors that modulate UV damage formation and repair at single-nucleotide resolution.” Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75115-4
For patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the presence of microvascular invasion (MVI) is one of the most important prognostic factors. Tumor cells that have infiltrated nearby blood vessels dramatically increase the risk of recurrence after surgical resection or ablation. But MVI can currently only be confirmed after surgery, by examining the resected tissue under a […]
Alzheimer’s disease research has undergone a profound transformation in the last five years. For the first time in history, there are treatments that alter the biological course of the disease rather than just managing symptoms. There are blood tests that can detect pathology years before cognitive decline. And the understanding of what drives the disease, […]
Fermi’s golden rule is one of the most widely applied formulas in quantum physics. It gives the rate at which a quantum system transitions between states under a weak perturbation, and it is taught to every physics undergraduate. But the rule, proposed by Enrico Fermi in the 1940s, is an approximation rooted in perturbation theory. […]
Opinion dynamics, disease spreading, and statistical physics may seem like disparate fields. One studies how beliefs evolve through social influence. Another tracks how infections propagate through populations. The third describes how systems of many interacting particles behave collectively. But beneath the surface, they share a common mathematical skeleton: agents or particles with binary states, choosing […]
Environmental scientists are trained to collect data, run models, and test hypotheses. What they are not routinely trained to do, argues a new PNAS Opinion article, is recognize when their science rests on value judgments, and how to navigate the ethical dimensions of the decisions they inform. The piece, “Why environmental scientists need ethics training […]
For the first time, an RNA editing therapy has entered clinical trials for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and early data suggest it works. The therapy, called LEAPER 2.0 and delivered as a drug candidate named LE051, uses circular RNAs to recruit the body’s own RNA editing enzymes and skip over disease-causing mutations in the dystrophin gene. […]
Can quantum mechanics do without imaginary numbers? For decades, physicists assumed the answer was no, that the complex numbers at the heart of the theory were not merely convenient but fundamentally necessary. A new analysis published in Physical Review Letters suggests otherwise. Pedro Barrios Hita, a doctoral researcher at Heinrich Heine University (HHU) Dusseldorf working […]
