Science

One of the most persistent challenges in quantum computing is drift: the control parameters that keep a quantum processor running at peak performance shift over time due to temperature fluctuations, material aging, and other environmental factors. The standard solution is to stop the computation, run calibration routines, and restart, a process that wastes time and […]

Tropical forests across South America stopped absorbing carbon dioxide during the 2015-2016 El Nino, according to a landmark study published in Nature Climate Change, and with a strong El Nino already underway in 2026, starting from record-warm oceans and record-high air temperatures, scientists warn this year could trigger losses on an unprecedented scale. The study, […]

Octopuses have long fascinated biologists with their distributed nervous systems, camouflage capabilities, and tool use. Now researchers have uncovered a molecular quirk that may help explain another dimension of their biological exceptionalism: shallow-water octopuses carry a unique break in their ribosomal RNA that makes their protein-building machinery roughly twice as accurate as that of their […]

In May 1994, an Egyptologist named Bob Brier and an anatomist named Ronn Wade began what no one had attempted in roughly 2,000 years: mummifying a modern human body using exclusively ancient Egyptian tools and techniques. The body belonged to a 76-year-old Baltimore man who had died of a heart attack and donated his remains […]

The standard way to measure cooling demand, counting how many degrees the temperature rises above a baseline, then summing those degrees over a season, has a fundamental blind spot: it treats a 30-degree humid day the same as a 30-degree dry day. A new study in Nature Communications shows that blind spot matters, and that […]

Two quantum sensing technologies, optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, are transforming how chemists and materials scientists measure the otherwise invisible, according to a comprehensive new review posted on arXiv by researchers at Harvard University and Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The review, led by Piotr Put (Harvard/Jagiellonian), Arjun Pillai, Xuan Hoang […]

Science is often presented as a universal endeavor, guided by curiosity and logic rather than politics. But a sweeping new quantitative analysis of roughly 80 million publications from 1970 to 2023 tells a different story, one in which geopolitical shocks, national priorities, and deep structural inequalities between the Global North and South shape what gets […]

Are we in the midst of a male reproductive crisis? The question has generated one of the most polarized debates in modern reproductive science, and a major investigation by The Guardian’s science correspondent Hannah Devlin provides the most comprehensive portrait yet of the evidence, the personalities, and the politics driving it. The alarmist case The […]

A team of researchers from Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University has shown that a concept borrowed from ecology, critical slowing down, can predict when a drone is about to lose control due to incremental damage, well before any visible signs of instability. The study, published in PNAS, represents the first application of critical […]

Researchers at Southeast University and HiNa Battery Technology in China have developed a sodium metal battery that can charge fully in four minutes and retain 90% of its capacity over 2,000 cycles, performance that, if scaled, could reshape the economics of electric vehicle batteries. The key innovation, published in Nano-Micro Letters, is a tin-based quasi-solid […]