Science

A team of researchers in China and France has developed a compact optical sensor capable of detecting carbon dioxide at concentrations as low as 168 parts per trillion, roughly 2,500 times more sensitive than ambient atmospheric CO₂ levels. The device, described July 4 in Nature Communications, uses a whispering gallery mode microcavity, a tiny glass […]

Neural replay, the brain’s mechanism of briefly re-activating patterns of neural activity in the same sequence they occurred during a prior experience, has long been considered a hallmark of the hippocampus, tightly tied to spatial navigation and memory consolidation. A new technique developed by researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Daejeon, South […]

A study of nearly 1,000 children has identified a specific molecular signal consistently associated with the brain structural organization that underlies mathematical and reading abilities. The finding, published July 4 in Nature Communications, bridges a gap between molecular neurochemistry and the large-scale brain architecture that supports academic learning, and points to a potential target for […]

For patients with cancers driven by ATM kinase deficiency, a group that includes some breast, lung, and hematologic malignancies, the treatment landscape has been marked by a frustrating paradox. ATM-deficient tumors are inherently sensitive to certain classes of chemotherapy and targeted drugs, including topoisomerase I inhibitors and PARP inhibitors. Yet a subset of these tumors […]

Near the entrance of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, a postdoctoral researcher named Witold Morek kneels beside a brick-and-flint wall, scraping lichen into an envelope. Inside that lichen, invisible to the naked eye, are tardigrades, microscopic animals sometimes called water bears, famous for their ability to survive the vacuum of space, boiling heat, extreme […]

When temperatures rise, plants respond with a suite of morphological changes, stems elongate, leaves lift and thin, flowering accelerates. This process, called thermomorphogenesis, is critical for survival in warming conditions but becomes harmful if uncontrolled: excessive stem elongation wastes resources and increases the risk of lodging in crops. A study published July 4 in Nature […]

The sense of smell has been called “the bestial sense”, Paul Broca’s 19th-century dismissal that, according to researchers, led to decades of scientific neglect. But the experience of millions who lost their sense of smell during the COVID-19 pandemic has changed that. Of roughly 780 million reported COVID-19 cases globally, approximately 60 percent experienced smell […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected abundant complex organic carbon in mudstones on the floor of Jezero Crater, the most robust detection of organic matter on Mars outside Gale Crater. The finding, published June 24 in Science Advances and reported this week by Ars Technica, is both encouraging and inconclusive: the carbon could be the remains […]

The brain learns to recognize familiar objects at two very different speeds: the rapid adaptation that occurs within minutes of seeing something new, and the gradual consolidation that builds over days into durable recognition. A study published July 4 in Nature Communications shows these two timescales are driven by fundamentally different mechanisms in the primate […]

On July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, the known universe was small. Five planets were recognized (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). The heliocentric model was settled. The Milky Way was a diffuse ribbon across the sky. And for all anyone knew, that ribbon was the entire cosmos. Two hundred and fifty […]