Science

The Jacobian conjecture has swallowed careers for 87 years. Posed in 1939 by Ott-Heinrich Keller, it asks a deceptively simple question: if a polynomial map from n-dimensional complex space to itself has a Jacobian determinant that is a nonzero constant everywhere, must the map have a polynomial inverse? Generations of mathematicians have claimed proofs, watched […]

Quantum computers have a housing problem. The most powerful machines on Earth, IBM’s and Google’s, live inside dilution refrigerators that cool their processors to roughly 10 to 20 millikelvin, colder than deep space, in facilities that cost millions to build and run. A German startup is selling a different vision: a quantum computer that fits […]

For nineteen months, a discarded Falcon 9 upper stage tumbled through a chaotic, moon-crossing orbit. The 3,600-kilogram (four-ton) piece of space hardware had finished its real job in January 2025, when it delivered two lunar landers toward the Moon. On August 5, 2026, it finished the job it never meant to do. At 06:35 UTC, […]

Polyvinyl chloride is the plastic the recycling industry would rather not talk about. Roughly 60 million tonnes are produced worldwide every year, and it is everywhere, from pipes and window frames to cables and flooring, prized for its durability, low cost, and fire resistance. That durability is exactly the problem: PVC does not break down […]

Antibiotic resistance has usually been told as an adult story: children, the argument went, have robust immune systems and shorter exposure histories, so the crisis could wait. A new study in JAMA Pediatrics, built on more than 106,000 bacterial isolates from children in 82 countries collected over 19 years, says that comfort is misplaced: resistance […]

A frequency comb is one of the most orderly objects in physics: a laser whose spectrum is a ladder of perfectly equidistant frequencies, precise enough to serve as the optical ruler that won John Hall and Theodor Hansch a share of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. Most combs demand a near-perfect resonator or a […]

Exercise guidelines usually assume that a week’s worth of training should be spread across multiple days, an assumption that often keeps people with demanding jobs, long commutes, or family responsibilities from exercising at all. A randomized controlled trial from Hong Kong now provides some of the strongest evidence yet that the weekly dose matters more […]

Quantum key distribution promises communication that cannot be secretly read, but building a network out of it has always forced a choice. Most designs route keys through a hub that users must trust. A more ambitious architecture, the fully connected network, links each user directly with every other user, yet its complexity grows so fast […]

Britain has begun subsidizing air conditioning without calling it that. Since April, homeowners in England and Wales can claim 2,500 pounds toward a reversible air-air heat pump, a machine that warms a home in winter and cools it in summer. It is, in all but name, the country’s first cooling subsidy, yet it is badged […]

The most useful thing about a major new review of protein and aging is not its conclusion, which remains contested, but the frame it gives the entire argument. Bailey Knopf and Dudley Lamming of the University of Wisconsin-Madison have organized more than 350 studies into a list of six hallmarks of protein restriction, the first […]