Science

Air pollution appears to alter how sperm genes function, one of the largest fertility studies of its kind has found. Men exposed to common outdoor pollutants during the period when their sperm were developing showed subtle DNA changes affecting whether genes were switched on or off, researchers reported at the annual meeting of the European […]

The human cortex contains more than 16 billion neurons linked by approximately 150,000 kilometers of axons, forming roughly 164 trillion synapses. How such an astronomically complex network organizes itself, neither completely random nor rigidly regular, has been one of neuroscience’s deepest puzzles. A study published August 20 in Cell proposes a surprisingly simple answer: the […]

When Lauren Jager, a chemistry undergraduate at Idaho State University, submitted her personal statement for a scholarship, it was written entirely by her. She ran it through an online AI detector anyway, out of curiosity. It came back at nearly 100% AI-generated. “I started freaking out,” she told Nature. Jager’s experience is not unusual. The […]

On July 5, 1996, a lamb was born at the Roslin Institute in Scotland that would change biology forever. She was not remarkable in appearance, a white-faced Finn Dorset with a placid temperament. But she was the first mammal ever cloned from an adult somatic cell, a feat that had been dismissed as biologically impossible […]

The booming market for online GLP-1 prescriptions is built on convenience: a few clicks, a brief questionnaire, and a month’s supply of a weight-loss drug arrives at your door. But a new secret shopper study published July 6 in JAMA reveals how little clinical oversight many of those prescriptions involve. Researchers at Yale University posed […]

For twenty years, computer scientists have wrestled with a deceptively simple question: can a quantum computer verify solutions to problems that a classical computer cannot even describe? The answer, it turns out, is yes, and the proof is 96 pages long. A team of four researchers, John Bostanci (Simons Institute / Columbia), Jonas Haferkamp (Ruhr […]

Psoriasis affects more than 125 million people worldwide, and while biologic therapies that block the IL-17 pathway have transformed treatment, they remain expensive, require injection, and suppress the immune system systemically. A new study published in Nature Communications on July 6 opens the door to a different approach: topical creams that achieve the same effect […]

At a collapsed limestone cave on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkiye, nearly 20,000 stone artifacts tell a remarkable story of continuity. Layer after layer, across a 30,000-year span that covers both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens occupations, the technology stays the same. The raw materials are the same. Even the seashells they chose to collect […]

The Sun released a powerful X1.3-class solar flare on the afternoon of July 4, peaking at 4:41 p.m. Eastern Time (20:41 UTC), NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory confirmed. The flare originated from a newly emerged sunspot region designated AR4482 on the Sun’s southeast limb. X-class flares are the most intense category on the solar flare scale, […]

At a collapsed limestone cave on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkiye, nearly 20,000 stone artifacts tell a remarkable story of continuity. Layer after layer, across a 30,000-year span that covers both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens occupations, the technology stays the same. The raw materials are the same. Even the seashells they chose to collect […]