Tiny Dinosaur Rewrites 70 Million Years of Evolution The bones were so small that at first glance they looked like they might belong to juveniles. But Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes reckoned otherwise. Scattered across the Burgos Province site in…

Bat Caves In Cambodia Hide Clues To A Pig Pandemic’s Mysterious Origins The Battambang bat caves draw tourists from around the world. Each evening, thousands of bats pour from the limestone cliffs in swirling clouds, a spectacle that fills the Cambodian sky. What visitors don’t see is the…

How the 2024 Election Changed Who Wants a Gun In the first weeks of January 2025, Michael Anestis and his team at Rutgers University's New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center were watching something unexpected unfold. The same adults they'd surveyed just before the November election were reporting…

The Fish That Saved Two Million Dollars Jean Giacomotto had 18 days to find an answer. Two newborns, one in Australia, one in Germany, carried genetic mutations nobody had seen before. Each baby also carried a known deadly mutation for spinal muscular atrophy, making them prime candidates for…

The Fungus Munching Through Mountains Of Toxic Waste In a laboratory at Nanjing Agricultural University, a common soil fungus is doing something chemical engineers have struggled with for decades. Aspergillus niger, the same organism that helps ferment soy sauce and produces citric acid for fizzy…

New Technique Unlocks Gene Therapy for Hundreds of Conditions Gene therapy just leapt past a barrier that’s held it back for years. Researchers in China have worked out how to pack oversized genes into the viral delivery vehicles that doctors use to treat genetic diseases, a trick that could…

Whales Share Resources to Survive Climate Change Off Canada’s coast, in the cold waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, something extraordinary is quietly happening. Three species of baleen whales—creatures so massive they seem to belong to another era—are changing what they eat. They’re doing it…

AI Is Making Scientists Stars While Dimming the Light of Discovery Imagine you’re a PhD student named Leo. You have two choices. You could spend the next five years in a dusty basement lab, trying to figure out a “weird” question about how the very first molecules of life sparked into existence.…

Arctic Whales Use Genetic Insurance To Prevent Extinction The ice in Bristol Bay closes down hard by November, locking away the whales for months in the icebound waters beneath it. When researchers finally arrive in spring with their small boats and biopsies, they’re after something most people…

The Creativity Threshold: When AI Meets the Average Mind Picture a task so simple it takes four minutes. Generate ten words. That’s all. Make them as different from each other as possible, in every way that matters (meaning, usage, the way they sound in the mouth). This isn’t a test you’d find in…

The Science of the Pause: Computational Mapping Reveals the Hidden Engineering Behind Stand-Up Comedy The comedian takes a breath, counts to three in her head, and delivers the punchline about hippies managing finances. Laughter ripples through the Edinburgh venue, timing out at roughly 2.4…

The Cigarette Butt Supercapacitor Eight million tonnes of cigarette butts are tossed onto streets and into bins worldwide each year. Most decompose glacially slowly, leaching toxins as they go. But what if this ubiquitous waste could power your phone? Researchers in China have transformed…

Gene Loss in Early Pancreatic Tumors May Predict Deadly Outcomes Pancreatic cancer kills quietly. By the time symptoms appear, the disease has usually spread beyond surgical reach. Researchers at Tokyo University of Science have now identified a gene whose early disappearance helps explain why…

Artificial Empathy and the Future of Lonely Recovery Stroke patients grinding through repetitive arm exercises know the look: a therapist checking the clock, mentally calculating how many more patients need attention before shift end. That glance, however brief, changes the room. Healthcare…

A Persistent Hum Might Help Clear Alzheimer’s Plaques—For Weeks Families watching Alzheimer’s take hold have heard promises before. But what if the answer wasn’t a drug or surgery, but a sound—a low, steady drone at the pitch of a refrigerator hum? Inside a research lab in China, nine aged rhesus…

Natural Light Sharpens Blood Sugar Control in Diabetes Patients People with type 2 diabetes who work near windows show steadier blood glucose levels than those under artificial lighting, according to research that tracked volunteers through identical daily routines under different light sources.…

One Night of Sleep Data Can Predict Your Disease Risk Years Ahead The next time someone hooks you up to a sleep study, those sensors tracking your brain waves and heartbeat may not just be looking for snoring problems. They could be capturing something far more revealing: a physiological signature…

Maternal Stress Rewires Fetal Brains Along Sex-Specific Lines The developing mouse brain is a construction site where millions of neurons migrate to final positions, guided by molecular signals that act like cellular GPS. But when a mother's immune system flares or her gut bacteria get wiped out,…

Worms Organize Their World Without Thinking About It Watch a centimeter-long aquatic worm wiggle through a dish of scattered sand, and something peculiar happens. The grains gradually gather into compact piles. The mess disappears. It looks intentional, except the worm has no brain worth…

Green Hydrogen Just Got Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels, Thanks to Sugar For years, the price of clean hydrogen has stubbornly remained three to five times higher than the carbon-heavy version made from natural gas. That gap has kept the hydrogen economy theoretical rather than practical. A new…

China’s Fusion Reactor Breaks Density Ceiling That Has Limited Tokamaks for Decades Fusion plasmas have been hitting the same density wall for 40 years. Push the fuel concentration too high and the reactor fails within seconds, ending the shot in a cascade of instability. That empirical limit,…

Your Muscles Keep Their Own Molecular Calendar Forensic investigators examining unidentified remains face a stubborn problem: traditional age markers fade or mislead. Skeletal muscle, though, quietly archives its own history in chemical annotations that survive death and degradation. The first…

Brain Model Discovers Neurons That Reliably Predict Mistakes About 20 percent of neurons in a learning brain seem to be doing something counterintuitive. When these cells become more active, mistakes follow. A new computational model of the brain, built to mirror real neural circuits rather than…

Ferromagnet Mimics Superconductor in Quantum Computing Surprise Electrical current flowing through a junction of vanadium and iron produces unusually loud static. That noise, orders of magnitude stronger than expected, reveals something remarkable: iron behaving like a superconductor even though…

This Herbal Formula Did What Most Kidney Drugs Don’t: Reverse Damage Most treatments for diabetic kidney disease aim to slow decline. Improvement is rare. Patients take their pills, track their numbers, and watch their kidney function gradually worsen despite therapy. The goal is damage control,…

The Big Bang — a good theory while it worked Since 1964, the Big Bang has been the context for interpreting all of astronomy. The theory has been troubled since 1997 by observations that don’t fit the model. That was the year that accelerating expansion was documented. The most recent observation…

Bioweapons are an Abomination (and that includes “biodefense”) Some of the greatest health problems in America are traceable to our 80-year-old bioweapons research program. These include, HIV, Lyme Disease, COVID-19, and the steady rise in cancer incidence. The US has by far the largest bioweapons…

Guarding Europe’s hidden lifelines: how AI could protect subsea infrastructure EU-funded researchers are developing AI-powered surveillance tools to protect the vast network of subsea cables and pipelines that keep the continent’s energy and data flowing. By Michael Allen Thousands of kilometres…

Microbes on a mission to clean up Europe’s toxic soils EU-funded researchers are turning to nature’s very own clean-up crew to tackle toxic industrial soil pollution. By Ali Jones Outside the mountain town of Sabiñánigo in northern Spain, an abandoned chemical factory stands on land still scarred…

Gene Editing Shrinks Goldenberry Into Farm-Ready Size Goldenberries taste like a tropical vacation, which is great. The problem? They grow like weeds, which is decidedly not great if you're trying to run a commercial farm. The small fruit, wrapped in its signature papery husk, has been cultivated…

Cartilage Cells Secretly Orchestrate Bone’s Blood Supply Bones don't just grow longer. They build their own plumbing as they go, which is wild when you think about it. A new study out of China has tracked down the specific cells responsible for this hidden coordination act, and the answer involves…

America’s Cities Are Quietly Split by Invisible Lines On paper, American cities look dense, dynamic, and interconnected. But where people actually go each day tells a more fractured story. A new study from University College London researchers finds that every major U.S. city is shaped by hidden…

Polar Bears in Warmest Greenland Are Rewriting Their DNA For most polar bears, the future looks grim. More than two-thirds face extinction by 2050 as sea ice vanishes beneath their paws. But in southeast Greenland, a small population is living through what might be a preview of survival, adapting…

Mosasaur Tooth Proves Sea Monster Hunted Rivers Too A single dark tooth, nearly as long as your thumb, sat in a brown mudstone bed in North Dakota for 66 million years. When paleontologists finally pulled it from the Hell Creek Formation in 2022, they realized they were holding something that…

Microdosing’s Mood Boost Fades Fast, Study Shows Microdosing psychedelics delivers a measurable lift in mood and focus, but only on the day you take it. By the next morning, the benefits have evaporated. That's the core finding from a new international study tracking more than 1,400 people who…

One Pill Could Treat 82 Million Gonorrhea Cases Gonorrhoea is no longer a simple problem. It infects more than 82 million people globally each year, and the bacteria that cause the infection have been rapidly developing resistance to our existing drugs. This relentless evolution has created a…

Tiny Chip Opens the Door to a Million-Qubit Quantum Future Imagine a computer so powerful its essential control components take up an entire warehouse. Not just one room, but a massive space filled with dozens of optical tables. That's the reality for one of the most promising types of quantum…

Election Meddling Is for Sale, and the Price Spikes Just Before You Vote We tend to imagine election interference as a high-tech operation run by shadow agencies in bunkers. But in reality, influencing a national vote often comes down to something much simpler: the ability to pretend to be a…

Fifty Years of Pop: How Music Became Simpler and More Stressed You remember those summer afternoons. The car windows were down. The radio was humming a perfect, catchy tune. Maybe it was a Fleetwood Mac jam from 1977. Or maybe it was a synth-pop groove from 1985. The song may have been about…

Impossible Planet Is A Wet Lava Ball Under Blazing Old Star In planetary science, a fundamental rule dictates that time and proximity are killers. When a world orbits too closely to its star for billions of years, the stellar wind and radiation are supposed to strip it bare. All its atmosphere,…

Why Certainty Makes Us Suckers for Fakery The modern information landscape is a jungle of facts and lies. Every day, our feeds push claims about the world's biggest mysteries. Secret global power plays. Health advice "they" are hiding. It is tempting to grab a simple answer that makes sense of the…

The Paradox of Green Finance: When Good Intentions Stall Reform The trillion-dollar world of socially responsible investing (SRI) is built on a high ideal: use capital to drive positive change. Many SRI funds specifically target companies with significant pollution or social problems-the so-called…

Engineers Remove Analog Bottleneck From Next-Gen Probabilistic Computing For a decade, the promise of probabilistic computing has been overshadowed by a single, physical bottleneck: the need for bulky, power-draining analog control circuits. This technology relies on hardware elements, called…

Engineered Immune Cells Restore The Prime Of Life To Old Guts As we get older, our digestive systems lose their resilience. A meal we once enjoyed might become a source of discomfort. This isn't merely a consequence of age; it's often a sign that the intestinal epithelium, the single, crucial…

Webb Captures Universe’s Earliest Star Death And It Looks Familiar When the cosmos was a mere infant, 730 million years young, a massive star violently ended its life. This cataclysmic event, observed by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, is now the earliest and most distant supernova ever…

How Supercomputers Finally Learned to Manage Their Own Memories Supercomputers, capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second, represent the cutting edge of modern science. Yet, despite this staggering power, their work is often hamstrung by a single, critical bottleneck: getting the…

Prairie Strips Revive Dead Soil in Just a Decade Iowa's corn and soybean fields stretch to the horizon, an agricultural empire built on intensely managed dirt. For years, soil scientists assumed restoring degraded farmland would take generations, maybe centuries. The deep layers change too slowly,…

AI Cracks Dementia Diagnosis Using Simple Brain Scans Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia often produce nearly identical symptoms, creating a diagnostic nightmare that delays treatment and prolongs uncertainty for patients and families. Now engineers at Florida Atlantic University have…

Beaver Mimicry Booms Faster Than Science Can Verify As rivers across the Pacific Northwest face unprecedented climate stress, ecologists are turning to an unlikely hero: the North American beaver. Restoration projects that copy the beaver's dam-building work are spreading rapidly across the…

Forest Managers Engineer Fairer Rules For Pine Tree Growth A dense forest is a world defined by quiet. Yet beneath the canopy, a relentless war is waged. Every tree is engaged in a fierce, lifelong struggle for resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. This competition dictates which…