Science

The United Kingdom has experienced two record-shattering heatwaves in the space of two months, the first time such a pair of extreme events has occurred before August since 1911. A red extreme heat warning, only the second of its kind since the system was introduced in 2021, was issued for the June heatwave, and forecasters […]

In April 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, retracted a case study. The article, in the journal’s “Images in Clinical Medicine” section, described an 87-year-old man who coughed up bronchial casts after exposure to a forest fire. The image showed black, branching airway casts […]

It is one of the most universal frustrations of growing older: no matter how carefully you eat or how consistently you exercise, the belly fat seems to appear anyway. Even people whose weight remains stable in middle age often watch their waistlines expand as muscle mass declines. New research published in Science now explains why, […]

At 6:04 p.m. local time on June 24, as millions of Venezuelans watched Scotland play Brazil in a World Cup match, the ground began to shake. In Yumare, a town 90 kilometers (56 miles) west of Caracas, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake ruptured at a depth of 20 kilometers. Thirty-nine seconds later, a second, more powerful […]

For years, cell-free systems have been a powerful but limited tool in synthetic biology. They allow researchers to carry out transcription and translation outside a living cell, making them ideal for prototyping genetic circuits, producing difficult proteins, and building biosensors. But there has been a trade-off: the yield of messenger RNA (mRNA) from these systems […]

On June 22, the village of Pissos in southwestern France recorded a temperature of 44.3 degrees Celsius, the hottest measurement ever confirmed in the country. It was not an isolated reading. Across Europe, from Portugal to Poland, an unprecedented heatwave had breached records in at least 22 countries, and the World Weather Attribution consortium was […]

In June 2026, an international team of scientists aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor (too) spent 14 days exploring the tropical midwaters off the coast of Brazil. They returned with 31 previously undescribed species, a rate of discovery that ranks among the fastest ever achieved in marine biology. “This is the largest habitat […]

The US Supreme Court on June 25 dealt a decisive blow to tens of thousands of Roundup cancer lawsuits, ruling 7-2 that federal pesticide law preempts state-level claims that Bayer’s Monsanto failed to warn consumers about the alleged cancer risks of glyphosate. The decision in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, held […]

June 26: M5.8 off Chiba rocks Tokyo An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 struck off the coast of eastern Chiba Prefecture at 12:46 p.m. on June 26, 2026. The Japan Meteorological Agency said the quake originated at a depth of about 50 km (31 miles). Strong shaking was felt across central Tokyo, with […]

One statistic captures the scale of what is happening in pharmacology. In 2025, Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity, generated $36.5 billion in sales, making it the highest-grossing drug molecule in history. It surpassed Keytruda, Merck’s blockbuster cancer immunotherapy, which had held the title for years. Combined with Novo […]