Science

Prion diseases are among the most devastating and intractable in medicine. Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disorder, progresses from first symptoms to death in a median of just four to six months. There are no treatments. The fundamental problem is not a lack of candidate drugs but a lack of tools […]

Stress can linger long after the triggering event is over. A person who has experienced a traumatic incident may continue to avoid certain places, certain situations, a persistent internal state that colors their behavior for days, weeks, or longer. Biologists have long understood that this phenomenon is not unique to humans, but its underlying mechanisms […]

PARP inhibitors such as olaparib are among the most important cancer drugs of the past decade, but they come with a built-in limitation: they work well only in tumors that already have defects in DNA repair — most famously, BRCA mutations. For the majority of cancers that are “homologous recombination proficient” — roughly 90% of […]

Lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) are a group of more than 50 inherited diseases, each caused by a defect in the cell’s garbage-disposal system. The lysosome, the organelle responsible for breaking down fats, sugars, and proteins, fails to clear certain molecules, which accumulate to toxic levels. Most LSDs affect the brain, but how each gene defect […]

The global coffee industry, a $200 billion enterprise that supports the livelihoods of 125 million people, rests on an extraordinarily fragile foundation. Nearly all of the roughly 10 million metric tons of coffee beans consumed each year come from just two species: arabica (Coffea arabica), which accounts for about 60% of the global trade, and […]

In 2012, the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek proposed a radical idea: a crystal that repeats not just in space but in time, a phase of matter that spontaneously develops periodic motion, like a pendulum that never stops, without being periodically pushed. The idea was met with intense theoretical scrutiny, and for years it seemed that […]

One of the deepest ambitions of computational science is to watch a complex system, a turbulent fluid, a chemical reaction, an ecosystem, and extract the mathematical rules that govern its behavior. This is “equation discovery” or “symbolic regression,” and it has been pursued for decades. The challenge is that real-world data is noisy, multi-scale, and […]

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have taken a significant step toward producing human sperm in the lab, but the latest work, published in Cell Stem Cell and covered by Nature News, also makes clear how far the field still has to go. The team, led by reproductive biologist Eoin Whelan and developmental biologist Kotaro […]

For decades, the dominant theory of Parkinson’s disease progression has held that misfolded alpha-synuclein protein spreads from cell to cell through the brain, gradually destroying the dopamine neurons that control movement. But the molecular machinery that allows this spread has remained unknown, until now. A team led by Stephen M. Strittmatter at Yale School of […]

One of the great unresolved mysteries of Pacific archaeology is why the ancestors of modern Polynesians, after sailing east to reach Samoa and Tonga roughly 3,000 years ago, stopped for 1,700 years, and then, around 900 to 1100 AD, suddenly launched a breathtaking wave of eastward voyaging that reached Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island, and […]