Science

Researchers at UCLA have built a mirror that deliberately distorts what it reflects. The “lying mirror” is an engineered surface that transforms any image it reflects into a different, innocuous-looking pattern, concealing the original information. It uses no electronics, no computer, and no moving parts. The work appears in Nature Communications. The device, built by […]

Somosierra has 93 inhabitants, one restaurant with a serious paella operation, and a claim no other place in the Madrid region can match: on the evening of August 12, the sky above its mountain meadows will go dark for one minute and 29 seconds, the full totality of the first total solar eclipse seen from […]

For years, the race to make better perovskite solar cells was a race about the light-absorbing layer itself: tweak the crystal, widen the bandgap, add a passivating additive. A new paper suggests the decisive frontier has moved to something almost absurdly thin: a single molecular carpet, roughly a thousandth of the wavelength of visible light, […]

Most flying machines are defined by their moving parts: propellers, rotors, flapping wings. The robot described in Nature Communications this week has none. Weighing 36.7 milligrams, it generates thrust from ion wind, the stream of charged air molecules produced when a high voltage ionizes the air around an electrode. There are no mechanical actuators, no […]

The blood-brain barrier is the most effective security system in medicine: it keeps toxins and pathogens out of the brain, and it keeps almost every drug out with it. Biologics such as antibodies rarely reach the brain at therapeutic concentrations, a bottleneck that has frustrated attempts to treat brain disease with gene-silencing drugs. Researchers have […]

For decades, the only way to electrically stimulate a deep brain structure was to drill through the skull and implant electrodes. A new device from the University of Texas at Austin does something closer to the opposite: a flexible patch stuck to the skin delivers focused ultrasound seven centimeters (2.8 inches) into the brain, enough […]

For decades, the immune protein complement C3 has been studied as a sentinel of the bloodstream, the first responder that marks pathogens for destruction. A team at Nagoya University has now shown that its most consequential role in cancer therapy may be entirely local. The C3 that determines whether checkpoint immunotherapy works is not the […]

A genome is a string of nucleotides, and the same kind of artificial intelligence that generates prose can, in principle, generate one. Researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute have now done exactly that. They used genome language models, AI systems trained on billions of nucleotides the way chatbots are trained on words, to […]

Quantum technology has long assumed that entanglement, the connection between particles that underpins quantum computing and secure communication, requires a laser. Lasers are coherent: their waves march in step, single-colored, and that orderliness has seemed necessary to coax nonlinear crystals into splitting photons into entangled pairs. A team at the University of Ottawa and the […]

Macrophages can hand lipids directly to natural killer cells during contact, and the transferred fats suppress the killer cells’ production of interferon-gamma, according to a study from Trinity College Dublin published in Nature Communications. The work identifies a metabolic circuit in which one immune cell type restrains another without a cytokine signal. Natural killer cells […]