Quantum computing, biotech, fusion energy, and the scientific discoveries transforming our world.
59 articles
The collection merges archival observations spanning roughly three decades with fresh survey results, handing astronomers an unusually wide statistical canvas for weighing competing theories of how the cosmos stretches apart.
The detection, the first of an Aten-family object before impact, gave planetary defense systems a live rehearsal of the chain from discovery telescope to impact corridor.
The new atlas traces more than 300 million synapses across a fly's brain and gives scientists their first side-by-side view of the two known sex-specific connectomes, already exposing neurons found in only one sex.
A coffee-cup comparison may sound whimsical, but the underlying physics will shape how engineers touch down on, deflect and eventually mine the solar system's weakest worlds.
UC Berkeley researchers reported that 20-month-old female mice given the drug lived to a median of 834 days versus 742 for controls, and outperformed matched calorie restriction on several health measures.
A Nature study published on September 2 shows that genes on separate chromosomes can fuse into hybrid transcripts during immune responses, and deleting one such chimera left mice roughly half as able to control a Salmonella infection.
The case against biology in the Venusian clouds rested on the assumption that concentrated acid would destroy any folded protein, and new laboratory work undermines that assumption. Structures that give proteins their shape were observed to form in the exact solvent that fills the planet's cloud layer, which shifts the debate from chemistry toward biology.
The collaboration's cautious framing of the event, which arrived after years of null results, leaves open the possibility that the flash is an extremely unlikely background occurrence, and researchers are running new simulations before deciding whether to call it a detection.
A detector built to hunt dark matter has captured the faintest solar neutrino signal ever recorded, with less than a one-in-a-million chance the result is a statistical accident. The measurement gives physicists an exact map of the noise floor that next-generation dark-matter detectors must work against.
IBM and University of Chicago researchers completed a quantum computation that leading classical methods could not practically reproduce, using 70 error-corrected logical qubits and finishing the task in about 15 minutes.
University of Toronto researchers reported in Science on August 27 that chemically modified suppressor tRNAs delivered by inhaled lipid nanoparticles restored full-length proteins in cystic fibrosis models, a strategy aimed at the roughly 11% of inherited disorders caused by nonsense mutations.
A Guardian feature on August 27 profiled a wave of deep-learning systems that have solved open problems in combinatorics and representation theory, prompting mathematicians to confront what the breakthroughs mean for the profession.
MIT researchers published in Cell on August 14 that polyamines store iron in a non-reactive state inside cells, solving a decades-old mystery and pointing to combination cancer strategies and explanations for early-onset Parkinson's.
A UC Santa Barbara and UT Austin team has published the first numerical simulation matching the 1,000 km/s recoil speed of the runaway black hole spotted in 2022, identifying an extreme spin configuration as the source.
A team of Australian ornithologists warned on August 24 that backyard bird feeders are emerging hotspots for H5N1 transmission as the country's 2026 outbreak spreads. The warning follows genome sequencing that links six separate human exposures to feeder sites in Victoria and New South Wales.
A team using LRO topography and UV irradiance models has identified kilometer-scale niches at Nobile Rim, Connecting Ridge and De Gerlache Rim where common spacecraft-associated microbes could survive in dormant form. The authors say contamination baselines must be set before any sampling.
An international team published Orbformer in Nature on August 21, an ab initio foundation model pretrained on 22,000 molecular structures that matches classical multireference methods on bond dissociation and Diels–Alder benchmarks. The work is the first practical demonstration of amortizing the Schrödinger equation across many molecules.
Merck and Moderna said on August 20 that intismeran autogene, a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, met its primary endpoint in a 1,137-patient Phase 3 trial in high-risk melanoma. The result is the first late-stage clinical validation of personalized mRNA oncology and clears the path for regulatory filings in Q4.
Merck and Moderna on August 19 announced the first positive Phase 3 readout for a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine — mRNA-4157 combined with Keytruda — in high-risk resected melanoma. The combination reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 44 percent versus Keytruda alone, with a hazard ratio of 0.56 over a median 34-month follow-up.
A team led by Swinburne University's Dr. Marcus Lower reports in Nature on August 18 what may be the first detection of vacuum birefringence — light refracted by 'virtual particles' in apparently empty space — using NASA's IXPE X-ray telescope and CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope on magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408. The observation tracks polarization signatures consistent with a 90-year-old quantum electrodynamics prediction.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released its sharpest image of the Lion Nebula on August 16, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope confirmed its August 30 launch window, and a Nature paper published August 15 described the first glass-box dynamical-deep-learning model to deliver skillful ENSO seasonal forecasts.