Science

A collaboration between the University of Oxford, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and the University of Cambridge has achieved a milestone at the intersection of quantum computing and genomics: encoding a complete viral genome onto a quantum processor and running actual genomic analyses on it. The team used IBM’s latest Quantum Heron r2 processor, a 156-qubit […]

For more than two decades, the standard model of cosmology has relied on an invisible, repulsive force called dark energy to explain why the universe’s expansion is accelerating. But a new mathematical study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A suggests the acceleration may have a simpler origin — a fundamental instability baked into […]

A consortium of more than 100 researchers has published the first complete brain-to-body wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly — a map of every neuron connecting the central nervous system to the body, revealing a fundamental principle about how nervous systems produce behavior. The finding, published June 8 in Nature, challenges the intuitive notion […]

In 1993, physicist Matthew Choptuik made a discovery that still reverberates through general relativity: when you tune the strength of a gravitational wave or matter pulse just to the threshold of black hole formation, the system behaves in a strange, repeating pattern — a phenomenon called critical collapse with discrete self-similarity. Now, a team of […]

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), the MIT spin-off building what could become the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, has published five peer-reviewed papers detailing the physics that underpin its ARC reactor design. The collection, published in the Journal of Plasma Physics, represents the most detailed public accounting yet of how a privately funded commercial fusion […]

What if you could get some of the restorative benefits of sleep without actually sleeping? It sounds like a pitch from a wellness startup, but the question has genuine scientific weight. Sleep consumes roughly a third of our lives. If the brain’s essential housekeeping functions can be decoupled from the behavioral state of sleep — […]

When a kidney mass is spotted on a CT scan, the chain of decisions that follows is fraught with uncertainty. Is it benign or malignant? How aggressive is it? Will surgery be curative, or will the cancer return? Each question carries a different set of clinical consequences — and at every step, the risk of […]

Data centers running artificial intelligence already consume as much electricity as Saudi Arabia, the world’s 11th largest electricity consumer. By 2030, that figure could double, reaching 945 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, or roughly 3 percent of the entire planet’s projected energy use. The carbon footprint of that electricity would require 6.7 billion trees grown […]

Retatrutide delivers the largest weight loss ever seen in a Phase 3 obesity trial The race for the next generation of metabolic medicines delivered its most striking result yet this week at the American Diabetes Association’s 86th Scientific Sessions in New Orleans. Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, a once-weekly injection that […]

A single DNA letter rewrites sex: How one base pair can flip the entire program of mammalian development In the roughly three billion letters of the mammalian genome, a single one can be the difference between male and female. That is the startling conclusion of a study published April […]