General science & research news
Cockroaches have a reputation for surviving anything. A new study suggests their genomes have been quietly doing the same thing for over 150 million years: soaking up bacterial DNA and keeping it, generation after generation, whether or not it serves any useful function. The study, published June 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy […]
Six years after SARS-CoV-2 emerged, the question of how long its effects persist, particularly after the milder Omicron variant, remains a pressing public health concern. A new study from the Faroe Islands, published June 16 in PLOS ONE, provides one of the most detailed clinical portraits yet of long COVID following Omicron infection, with follow-up […]
Sources: O. Dobrovidova, “Russia’s plan to drill superdeep holes in Arctic revives controversial theory of ‘endless oil,'” Science AAAS, June 16, 2026 N.A. Kudryavtsev, “Against the organic hypothesis of oil origin,” Petroleum Geology (1951) B. Sherwood Lollar et al., “Abiogenic hydrocarbon production at Lost City hydrothermal field,” Science 319, 604-607 (2008) J. Kenney et al., […]
Source: JUNO Collaboration, “First measurement of reactor neutrino oscillations at JUNO,” Nature 654, 343-348 (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10538-z P. Vahle and Z. Vallari, “JUNO brings neutrino oscillation precision into a new era,” Nature News and Views (2026). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-01585-7
Sources: P. Voosen, “Dismantling of key ocean ‘telescope’ raises fears of U.S. retreat from marine science,” Science AAAS, June 16, 2026 Ocean Observatories Initiative, Official Announcement on OOI Descoping, May 21, 2026 A. Plueddemann, “Why the National Science Foundation’s dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative matters,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 2026 NASEM Decadal […]
Sources: D.C.L. Toscani et al., “A thorium-229 optical nuclear clock with feedback loop,” arXiv:2606.04997 (2026) B. Huang et al., “A nuclear clock based on 229-Th,” arXiv:2606.08870 (2026) K. Hughes-Castleberry, “The world’s first nuclear clock just ticked on,” Live Science, June 17, 2026
Synthetic biology has long promised programmable cells, living therapeutic devices that sense disease biomarkers, compute a response, and deliver a treatment. The vision is compelling, but it has run into a fundamental engineering barrier: complex logic requires many parts, each additional part consumes cellular resources, and the total genetic payload that can be delivered to […]
Microplastics have been found in human lungs, placentas, blood, and urine. They are in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. The dominant concern has been toxicological: do these particles cause inflammation, oxidative stress, or cellular damage? A study published June 16 in Nature Communications by researchers at Tianjin […]
In November 2025, a team from Yonsei University in South Korea published a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that sent ripples through cosmology. They claimed that after correcting for an overlooked bias, the age of the stars in the galaxies that host Type Ia supernovae, the data no longer supported […]
