Science

A collapsed cave near Waitomo on New Zealand’s North Island has yielded the first large terrestrial vertebrate fossil assemblage from the Early Pleistocene in the country’s history, and it tells a surprising story: between one-third and one-half of the bird species found in the deposit went extinct in the million years before humans ever reached […]

Researchers at the University of Oxford have identified a previously unrecognized driver of inflammatory bowel disease: autoantibodies that neutralize interleukin-10, the immune system’s primary anti-inflammatory signaling molecule. The finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, applies to approximately one in 30 IBD patients and represents the strongest known genetic association for any autoimmune […]

The most precise manufacturing device ever built by humans costs $400 million, weighs more than 150 tons, and fills the volume of a double-decker bus. Only one company in the world makes it. And the global semiconductor industry, from Intel to TSMC to Samsung, is betting its future on it. ASML’s high-NA EUV (high numerical […]

Researchers in Russia have reported that a chemical gel applied to the severed ends of a completely transected spinal cord can restore walking in pigs within two months. The approach, which the team calls “fusogenic neurosurgery,” uses polyethylene glycol and chitosan to physically fuse severed axonal membranes rather than waiting for slow natural regeneration. The […]

This article is based on a single case report published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Case reports cannot establish causality, and the findings should not be generalized to the broader Alzheimer’s population. See caveats below. An octogenarian woman with a 10-year history of advanced Alzheimer’s disease became conversational for several hours after consuming five grams of […]

For decades, the conventional narrative about menopause and the brain was simple: declining estrogen leads to cognitive decline, and there is not much to be done about it beyond hormone replacement therapy. A growing body of research, synthesized in a major feature by New Scientist’s Grace Wade, tells a far more complex story. Menopause is […]

Cancer cells have found an entirely new way to cheat death: they hijack a metabolic pathway to produce a molecule that literally mops up free iron, preventing a form of cell death called ferroptosis. The strategy uses spermine, a polyamine already abundant in the body, but repurposes it as a direct iron chelator through a […]

Amputated tissue fragments from a cold-water sea cucumber can survive, heal wounds, absorb nutrients, and continue dividing for over three years without any connection to a living organism. The discovery, published in Science Advances by a team led by Sara Jobson and Annie Mercier at Memorial University of Newfoundland, challenges fundamental assumptions about what it […]

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is a frozen fragment of an ancient planetary system that formed 10 to 12 billion years ago, at temperatures below 30 Kelvin, in a region of the Galaxy that was still chemically young. That is the conclusion of a study published in Nature by a team led by Martin Cordiner at […]

Not all fats are created equal, and a comprehensive review published in Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism makes the molecular case with unusual clarity: palmitic acid, the most abundant saturated fatty acid in the diet, actively promotes insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes through at least five distinct molecular pathways, while oleic acid, the monounsaturated […]