General science & research news
Every time a cell divides, its entire genome, three billion base pairs in humans, must be duplicated with near-perfect fidelity. That process begins with an enzyme called DNA primase, which lays down short RNA primers that DNA polymerases need to start copying. How primase itself gets started has been a long-standing puzzle: it must select […]
Lacunar stroke accounts for roughly one in four of all ischemic strokes, approximately 35,000 cases per year in the UK alone. These small, deep brain infarcts are routinely treated with antiplatelet drugs such as aspirin and clopidogrel, on the assumption that they are caused by the same atherosclerotic plaque buildup that drives other types of […]
On November 12, 2025, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave observatories detected a signal unlike any they had seen before. Designated S251112cm, the merger had a chirp mass between 0.1 and 0.87 solar masses, far too light to be a pair of ordinary stellar-mass black holes, and with only an 8 percent probability of involving a neutron […]
A mission that seemed impossible just 10 months ago is now underway. On July 3, a small spacecraft called LINK launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands on the final flight of Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL rocket, beginning a daring effort to rescue NASA’s aging Swift Observatory from a decaying orbit. If successful, the […]
A team of researchers in Barcelona has developed a device that can revive eyes from deceased donors, restoring their electrical responsiveness to light up to 10 hours after death. The work, described in a preprint posted to bioRxiv on June 30, marks what independent experts call a “new frontier for retina preservation” and opens a […]
A submarine volcano in the Indian Ocean has brought to the surface material from Earth’s primordial magma ocean, molten rock that crystallized more than 4.46 billion years ago, within the first 100 million years of the planet’s history. The discovery, published July 1 in Nature, is the first direct evidence that remnants of the magma […]
A landmark analysis of more than 3,000 animal bones from Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores has upended two decades of assumptions about the behavior of Homo floresiensis, the tiny hominin nicknamed “the hobbit.” The study, published July 3 in Science Advances, finds that H. floresiensis was a scavenger that fed on […]
France recorded 2,025 excess deaths during the last week of June, Sante Publique France reported on July 3, as the country emerged from its most severe early-summer heatwave on record. Deaths rose 29 percent nationally in the week of June 22-28 compared to baseline, with the Paris region (Ile-de-France) seeing a 62 percent increase. The […]
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) affects approximately one in seven pregnancies worldwide, increasing risks of preterm birth, cesarean delivery, and long-term metabolic disease for both mother and child. The standard approach, dietary modification, glucose monitoring and insulin when necessary, is reactive rather than preventive. An underlying trigger that could be addressed early has remained elusive. A […]
