Science

For the first time, astronomers have peered at the two edges of a distant world and found them profoundly different. One side, the morning limb, is shrouded in high clouds of vaporized rock. The other, the evening limb, is clear — offering an unobscured view of the planet’s true atmospheric composition. The finding, published in […]

The standard Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment imagines a quantum superposition of two familiar states: the cat alive and the cat dead. Both components of the superposition are ordinary, everyday possibilities, just combined in a way that classical physics cannot describe. A team at Oxford University has now created a fundamentally different kind of cat. Instead […]

For decades, structural biologists studying viral surface proteins have faced a fundamental trade-off. To get high-resolution images of how antibodies bind their targets, they have needed to extract those proteins from the viral membrane and purify them. But removing a membrane protein from its lipid environment can alter its shape, particularly in the regions closest […]

Converting carbon dioxide into fuel is an appealing idea: take the primary waste product of fossil fuel combustion and turn it back into something useful. The chemical path exists, hydrogenate CO2 to make methanol, but the process has been haunted by a fundamental trade-off that has resisted solution for decades. A team at the Dalian […]

The idea that young people today are forming fewer romantic relationships has become a familiar piece of generational commentary. A new study suggests the trend is more pronounced than earlier data captured, and that previous estimates may have been underestimating the size of the shift. Dr. Maximiliane Uhlich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of […]

Newton’s third law is one of the first things you learn in physics: if object A pushes object B, object B pushes back with equal force in the opposite direction. It is intuitive, foundational, and for many real-world systems, it is wrong. Bird flocks are a classic example. A bird looks forward and aligns with […]

Most quantum computing platforms are built around one kind of qubit. Superconducting circuits work one way, trapped ions another, and each platform spends years optimizing its single approach. A team at JILA (University of Colorado and NIST) has taken a different path: build a system where the same atom can serve as three different kinds […]

If you have ever wished you could just rest your tired brain for a minute without lying down and shutting everything off, new research suggests biology might have room for something like that, at least in mice. A team at the University of Wisconsin,Madison has shown that inducing the characteristic slow oscillations of non-REM sleep […]

Machine learning models have become powerful tools in cosmology, sifting through vast simulation datasets to infer the parameters that govern the universe. But a new study reveals an ironic limitation: the very thing that makes these models efficient, learning from known physics, can blind them to genuinely new phenomena. Researchers at Princeton University and the […]

Early embryonic development is often described as a carefully choreographed process of growth and differentiation, cells dividing, migrating, and specializing in precise sequence. But a new study suggests that hidden beneath this orderly surface lies a more strategic logic: individual cells make decisions about whether to kill their neighbors based on the embryo’s size relative […]