Science

This article is based on a single case report published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Case reports cannot establish causality, and the findings should not be generalized to the broader Alzheimer’s population. See caveats below. An octogenarian woman with a 10-year history of advanced Alzheimer’s disease became conversational for several hours after consuming five grams of […]

For decades, the conventional narrative about menopause and the brain was simple: declining estrogen leads to cognitive decline, and there is not much to be done about it beyond hormone replacement therapy. A growing body of research, synthesized in a major feature by New Scientist’s Grace Wade, tells a far more complex story. Menopause is […]

Cancer cells have found an entirely new way to cheat death: they hijack a metabolic pathway to produce a molecule that literally mops up free iron, preventing a form of cell death called ferroptosis. The strategy uses spermine, a polyamine already abundant in the body, but repurposes it as a direct iron chelator through a […]

Amputated tissue fragments from a cold-water sea cucumber can survive, heal wounds, absorb nutrients, and continue dividing for over three years without any connection to a living organism. The discovery, published in Science Advances by a team led by Sara Jobson and Annie Mercier at Memorial University of Newfoundland, challenges fundamental assumptions about what it […]

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is a frozen fragment of an ancient planetary system that formed 10 to 12 billion years ago, at temperatures below 30 Kelvin, in a region of the Galaxy that was still chemically young. That is the conclusion of a study published in Nature by a team led by Martin Cordiner at […]

Not all fats are created equal, and a comprehensive review published in Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism makes the molecular case with unusual clarity: palmitic acid, the most abundant saturated fatty acid in the diet, actively promotes insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes through at least five distinct molecular pathways, while oleic acid, the monounsaturated […]

Quantinuum has published the full specifications of its Helios quantum processor in Nature, a 98-qubit trapped-ion system that achieves the highest two-qubit gate fidelity of any commercial quantum computer and demonstrates all-to-all connectivity, meaning any pair of its 98 qubits can perform a two-qubit operation directly. The paper, with 166 co-authors led by Anthony Ransford […]

The cerebellum has long been cast as the brain’s movement coordinator, fine-tuning motor output while the cortex and hippocampus do the heavy lifting of cognition and memory. A massive new study published in Nature Neuroscience challenges that division of labor, showing that cerebellar structure provides an independent cognitive buffer against aging, and that it does […]

Building a brain is violent work. Newborn neurons, fresh from their birthplace, must squeeze through impossibly tight spaces to reach their final positions, and a new study published in Nature reveals that this physical confinement causes extensive double-strand breaks in their DNA as a routine part of development. The finding, from a team led by […]

Researchers at RWTH Aachen University have performed the first detailed teardown and characterization of a commercial sodium-ion battery cell from China’s HiNa Battery, finding that its manufacturing quality, cell-to-cell uniformity and tabless architecture, is comparable to Tesla’s industry-leading 4680 lithium-ion cells, even though its energy density remains roughly half. The findings, published in Cell Reports […]