Science

When patients with long COVID describe “brain fog” — the cognitive sluggishness, memory lapses, and mental fatigue that can persist for months or years after an otherwise mild infection — the leading biological hypothesis has been that the brain is simmering in a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation. Neuroinflammation […]

In September 2026 — just three months from now — NASA is scheduled to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a 2.4-meter observatory that astronomers believe will fundamentally transform our understanding of planets beyond our solar system. The projected yield from its primary exoplanet survey: over 100,000 new […]

CRISPR-Cas9 has dominated the field of functional genomics for a decade. It is the tool of choice for perturb-seq — the powerful technique that combines CRISPR-mediated gene disruption with single-cell RNA sequencing to read out the effects of genetic perturbations across thousands of cells at once. Cas9’s simplicity and […]

In the standard narrative of quantum computing, progress is measured in qubits — the fragile two-level quantum bits that form the basic unit of quantum information. Google has 105. IBM has more than 1,000. Every year brings hardware with more qubits, higher coherence times, and fewer errors. But a […]

For the nearly one billion people worldwide living with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), the standard of care — a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine — comes with an unglamorous reality: roughly half of patients abandon the device within a year. The mask is uncomfortable, the machine is noisy, […]

A powerful El Niño appears to be building in the tropical Pacific — one that forecasters warn could rival the strongest events of the past century. With global temperatures already at record highs, the combination could push the planet into unprecedented territory in 2026 and 2027. The latest forecast […]

Your Brain Decides to Approach Someone Before You Do — Zebrafish Reveal the Neural Precursors of Social Choice In the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet conducted a famous experiment: he asked participants to flex their wrist whenever they felt the urge, while measuring their brain activity. He found that a […]

The Largest Alzheimer’s Genetics Study Ever: 48 New Genes Pinpoint Novel Drug Targets Beyond Amyloid The genetics of Alzheimer’s disease has been one of the most intensively studied subjects in human genomics. Over the past two decades, successive genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified roughly 80 risk loci — […]

The Allen Institute’s $200 Million Bet: Mapping the Roots of Parkinson’s Before Symptoms Begin The Allen Institute for Brain Science has spent two decades building atlases of the brain — cataloging its cell types, their gene expression profiles, and their spatial organization with ever-increasing resolution. The Seattle-based institute’s Allen […]

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) committed up to $50 million to Moderna on Monday to develop an mRNA vaccine against Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV), as an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows no signs of slowing. A vaccine platform repurposed Moderna will apply the same […]