Science

How many times does a link need to be disproven before it stops being treated as an open question? The latest answer comes from Hong Kong, where researchers analyzed more than 700,000 mother-child pairs and found, once again, no association between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism or ADHD in children. The study, published June […]

The National Institutes of Health is heading toward one of the most constrained grant-award years in recent memory. By mid-June 2026, with roughly three months left in the fiscal year, the agency had awarded only about 5,000 new and competitive renewal grants, compared with 9,000 to 10,000 in a typical pre-2025 year. The projected shortfall […]

The nitrate problem in the world’s groundwater is not going away anytime soon, even if farmers stopped using nitrogen fertilizer tomorrow. A new study published in Nature Communications by Wen Zhao, Xiaoxu Jia, and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an international team of collaborators has produced the first comprehensive global estimate of […]

For the better part of a decade, the trajectory of artificial intelligence followed a simple formula: take a larger neural network, feed it more text, and watch performance improve. The scaling laws were remarkably predictable, until they were not. As building bigger and better chatbots gets harder, more expensive, and yields diminishing returns, a growing […]

The deuteron is the simplest atomic nucleus in existence: one proton and one neutron bound by the strong nuclear force. Its very simplicity is what makes it valuable to physicists. In a system with only two particles, theoretical predictions can be made with unusually high precision, and any deviation from those predictions becomes a clear […]

On Feb. 2, 2026, Nature Medicine published a paper that seemed to offer one of the simplest and cheapest ways to improve outcomes for lung cancer patients: just treat them before 3:00 PM. The study, LungTIME-C01, reported that patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who received immunochemotherapy in the morning or early afternoon had […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has appointed eight new members to its Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC), the panel that advises the agency on which bulk drug substances compounding pharmacies are allowed to use. A review by STAT News, CNN, and the Associated Press has found that the vast majority of the new appointees […]

Neurotransmitter release is the fastest information-processing event in the nervous system. Within a few hundred microseconds of an action potential arriving at the synapse, synaptic vesicles fuse with the presynaptic membrane and dump their contents into the synaptic cleft. This speed is achieved by calcium sensors, proteins that detect the influx of calcium ions and […]

For more than a century, biologists knew that cells could sense and follow electric fields. The phenomenon was called galvanotaxis, named after Luigi Galvani, the 18th-century physicist who discovered bioelectricity. But the question of how cells actually detect these fields remained one of the most stubborn mysteries in cell biology. Now, a team led by […]

Your brain does not process the world in a steady, continuous stream. Every time your heart contracts, roughly once per second, it sends a wave of afferent signals up through the vagus nerve and brainstem to the cortex, competing for the same limited neural resources that process what you see, hear, and feel. A new […]