Science

The LZ901 vaccine was 91.6% effective against shingles in a phase 3 trial of 26,018 adults aged 40 and older, published in Nature Communications. Protection was not evenly distributed across age groups: efficacy reached 93.9% in adults aged 40 to 69 but fell to 66.9% in those aged 70 and older. The trial, registered as […]

The brain has its own immune system, staffed for most of a lifetime by cells that arrive early in development and stay. A new study of the human hippocampus, the memory center, suggests that around age 50 this long-term staff begins to be replaced by newcomers: cells carrying the inflammatory signatures of blood-derived immune cells. […]

Tamara Dubowitz’s study of cognitive aging in Black residents of low-income Pittsburgh neighborhoods was nearly done. The five-year, $9.6 million grant from the National Institute on Aging had roughly $7 million spent, a cohort of about 600 predominantly African American residents tracked through interviews and health measures, and a completion date in sight. On August […]

On August 5, 2026, the FDA approved Moderna’s mFLUSIVA for adults 50 and older, marking the first time the messenger-RNA platform that proved itself against COVID-19 has been cleared for seasonal influenza. The approval caps a regulatory saga that included a rare refusal-to-file letter, a reversal months later, and a unanimous advisory committee vote, and […]

High-temperature superconductors have a shadow state that has haunted condensed matter physics for decades. Cool a cuprate material and, before it becomes superconducting, it passes through a strange phase where the material behaves like a metal but with something missing: a gap in its low-energy excitations that should not be there. This pseudogap phase has […]

The most efficient perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells are made by solution processing, a method that works in the lab but struggles on industrial production lines, where uniformity and reliability matter more than a record number. Thermal evaporation, the technique the semiconductor industry already knows, should be the scalable route, but it has always hit a […]

A team led by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and Dartmouth College has uncovered more than 100 fossils in Canada’s Mackenzie Mountains after a decade of expeditions by helicopter and foot. The find is rewriting the earliest chapters of animal life, not because the animals are older than anyone thought, but because […]

Food allergy has a biology problem: the treatments that exist stop working when you stop taking them. Oral immunotherapy raises tolerance, but the protection wanes without continued exposure, and patients live with the constant arithmetic of avoiding a single peanut. A team at Boston Children’s Hospital tested a fundamentally different idea: changing the immune system’s […]

Morphine does two things at once. It dulls pain, and it teaches the brain to want the experience again. For decades, researchers have assumed those two effects share a single neural currency: dopamine. The opioid reward, the theory went, is essentially a dopamine signal in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s motivation hub. A new study […]

The hat is a shape that should not exist. Discovered in 2023 by the amateur geometry enthusiast David Smith and collaborators, it is a 13-sided polykite that can tile an infinite plane with no gaps and no repetition, the first single shape, or monotile, to solve the so-called einstein problem that had stood for half […]