General science & research news
The black hole at the center of galaxy MRG-M0138 is a relic. It weighs six billion times the mass of the Sun, placing it among the most massive objects in the known universe. But it has gone quiet. No gas spirals into it. No radiation escapes its event horizon. […]
PFAS compounds are called forever chemicals for a reason. The carbon-fluorine bond that makes them so useful in nonstick pans, waterproof jackets, and firefighting foam also makes them virtually indestructible in the environment. They accumulate in groundwater, in soil, in the tissues of wildlife, and in human blood. A […]
The intensive care unit is a place of measurement. Every beep, every waveform, every lab result feeds into a continuous calculus of life and death. But for one of the hardest questions a family can ask — *will they wake up?* — the toolkit has been surprisingly blunt. A […]
For half a century, physicists have chased a holy grail: a theory that marries general relativity — Einstein’s majestic description of gravity as warped space-time — with the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics. It is the single biggest open problem in fundamental physics, and progress has been slow. But […]
Neutral-Atom Quantum Computers Just Crossed a Critical Threshold In the race to build a useful quantum computer, three fundamentally different technologies have emerged as frontrunners. Superconducting circuits — the approach used by Google and IBM — operate at millikelvin temperatures inside massive dilution refrigerators. Trapped ions — the approach […]
A New Diabetes Pill Burns Fat Without Ozempic’s Downsides — But It’s Still Early The drug, called ATR-258, is a first-in-class small-molecule pill developed by Stockholm-based Atrogi AB. It’s not a GLP-1 agonist. It’s not an injection. And in preclinical models, it does something no current diabetes drug can […]
After Empty Promises, String Theory’s Unlikely Second Life For decades, string theory has been physics’ most beautiful failure — a “theory of everything” that would unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, promised in the 1980s and never delivered. But while the theory-of-everything debate raged, something unexpected happened. String theory’s […]
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been used to treat severe, treatment-resistant depression for more than two decades, with response rates of 60 to 75% in patients who have exhausted every other option. But exactly how it works has remained surprisingly unclear. DBS involves implanting electrodes in specific brain regions […]
At its Build developer conference in San Francisco on June 2, 2026, Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2, the second generation of its topological qubit chip. The company announced dramatic improvements: 12 qubits instead of 8, qubit coherence times averaging 20 seconds — with isolated cases exceeding one minute — and […]
