Science

Update to our June 25 report on Europe’s extreme heat wave. The following developments have emerged since the morning article. The heat wave gripping Western Europe intensified sharply on June 24, with the United Kingdom recording its hottest June day in history, 36.1 °C (97 °F) in Gosport, Hampshire, beating the previous June record of […]

A team at Imperial College London has engineered bacteriophages, viruses that normally infect bacteria, to deliver a malaria antigen directly to tumor cells, redirecting pre-existing vaccine-induced immunity to destroy cancer. In mice with established colorectal tumors, the approach produced durable complete remissions in 44 percent of animals, with no detectable toxicity. The work, published in […]

The oldest known asteroid impact site on Earth has been confirmed in Western Australia’s Pilbara Craton, pushing back the oldest recorded impact by more than half a billion years. The Miralga Impact Structure, preserved as the 35-kilometer-wide North Pole Dome, has been dated to 3.02 billion years ago by a team led by Chris Kirkland […]

A clock on the Moon runs about 56 microseconds per day faster than an identical clock on Earth. That is not a theoretical curiosity, it is a practical problem for a future in which dozens of countries, private companies, and possibly hundreds of people are operating on and around the Moon. Without a shared time […]

The Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 17, has now reached 1,118 confirmed cases and 291 fatalities in the DRC, with 20 additional cases and 2 deaths in Uganda, making it the third-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. Next week, […]

The central dogma of molecular biology, that DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is translated into protein according to the genetic code, carries a quiet assumption: that the ribosome reads the code correctly, producing exactly the protein the gene specifies. A study published June 24 in Nature by researchers at Northeastern University, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and […]

A Herculaneum papyrus scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, so fragile that any attempt to physically unroll it would reduce it to ash, has been completely virtually unwrapped for the first time, yielding more than a meter of continuous text. The breakthrough, announced at a conference in Naples on June […]

A paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal proposes that an intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 10,000 solar masses orbits the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and that this hidden companion may solve a longstanding puzzle about the Galactic Center’s young star populations. The authors, led by Xiaochen Zheng […]

The Perseverance rover has detected macromolecular carbon, large, cross-linked networks of reduced organic material, at multiple locations across the floor of Jezero Crater, according to a study published June 24 in Science Advances. The detection, made by the SHERLOC instrument (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) on the rover’s robotic […]

One of the most fundamental assumptions in modern cosmology is that the universe, when viewed at sufficiently large scales, looks the same in every direction. This principle of isotropy, a cornerstone of the standard ΛCDM cosmological model, predicts that any directional irregularities in galaxy distributions should fade beyond about 100 megaparsecs (roughly 326 million light-years). […]