Can AI Detect Smuggled Sea Cucumbers?
Scientists have trained an artificial‑intelligence model on 3‑D X‑ray scans of dried shark fins, seahorses and sea cucumbers to detect them in luggage. Tested on hundreds of images, the algorithm correctly identified the wildlife samples 92% of the time with a 13% false‑positive rate. The approach uses existing airport X‑ray equipment and is intended to augment, not replace, human inspectors and detection dogs. Researchers plan to pilot the system in airports to strengthen marine wildlife enforcement.
Report: FDA Just Launched a Study on the Abortion Pill
The FDA has opened a six‑month safety review of mifepristone, the abortion pill approved since 2000, amid heightened political scrutiny from the Trump administration. Health experts emphasize that extensive research already confirms the drug’s safety, even when delivered via telehealth....
How Breast Cancer Screening Can Predict Heart Disease Risk
Researchers have created an artificial‑intelligence model that automatically scans routine mammograms for breast arterial calcifications (BAC) and quantifies their severity. The study, covering over 120,000 women at Emory and Mayo Clinic sites, found that even modest BAC levels raise cardiovascular...
Bumblebees Use Tools to Solve Complex Problems—Despite Not Being Trained to Do So
A new study in Science shows bumblebees can spontaneously use a Styrofoam ball as a tool to access a sugar‑filled flower, despite never being trained. In a series of chamber tests, 16 of 22 bees rolled the ball into the...
Did We Just See a Primordial Black Hole at the Milky Way’s Edge?
Researchers at Swinburne University claim to have observed a primordial black hole, dubbed “Phoebe,” with a mass about three times that of Earth’s Moon, using microlensing of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud captured by the Dark Energy Camera....
Humans Conquered the Planet 300 Times Faster than Genetic Evolution Can Explain
Humans have colonized the planet in roughly 300,000 years, a pace far beyond what genetic evolution alone would allow. A new PNAS study by Charles Perreault quantifies this advantage, estimating that without cultural transmission it would have taken about 88 million...
Search for Alien Technology on Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Comes up Empty
Astronomers used the Allen Telescope Array to search for technosignatures from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered in July 2025 traveling 137,000 mi/h. The comet’s composition—methanol and frozen CO₂—pointed to a natural origin. After several hours of full‑band observations, no narrow‑band radio signals were...
Landmark Pancreatic Cancer Treatment Paves Way for Targeting Other Tricky Tumors
Revolution Medicines’ pan‑RAS inhibitor daraxonrasib more than doubled median overall survival in a phase III trial of 500 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, extending life from 6.7 to 13.2 months. The drug uniquely disables all three RAS isoforms, overcoming a decades‑long...
NASA’s Mars Mission MAVEN Is Lost Forever
NASA announced that the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, launched in 2013, is officially lost after contact was lost in early December 2025. Engineers observed unexpected rotation and a possible orbital shift, and subsequent attempts to reacquire the...
Microsoft’s Upgraded Majorana Quantum Computing Chip Fizzles with Physicists
Microsoft announced the Majorana 2 quantum chip, a topological device that it says can keep qubits coherent for up to a minute and could enable millions of qubits on a single wafer. The claim rests on a new preprint that replaces...
Sturgeon Fish Sex Sounds Like ‘Thunder’
Researchers recorded low‑frequency “thunder” sounds emitted by Atlantic sturgeon during Hudson River spawning. The grumbling noises, likely caused by males thrashing against females or swim‑bladder vibrations, represent the first acoustic documentation of this endangered species' mating. Scientists suggest the sounds...
Questioning Everything
Scientific American’s special edition tackles the universe’s biggest mysteries, from the elusive nature of dark matter and dark energy to the origins of stars and light. The issue highlights how cutting‑edge tools like the James Webb Space Telescope are revealing...
China Launches Rival to SpaceX Falcon 9 with Zero Warning
China’s state‑run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) launched the Long March 12B on Monday, the first flight of a vehicle positioned as a rival to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The launch occurred without the customary airspace or maritime warnings that international aviation...
Scientists Are Racing to Stop a Type of Ebola We Have No Vaccine For
The Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Uganda are facing an outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, a virus for which no approved vaccine or targeted treatment exists. The World Health Organization declared the situation a public‑health emergency...
New Protein-Folding AI Vastly Expands on Alphafold's Efforts
Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub have released the ESM Atlas, an open‑source collection of 1.1 billion predicted protein structures and 6.8 billion sequences. The underlying model, ESMFold2, claims to surpass DeepMind’s AlphaFold 3, especially in predicting protein complexes such as antibodies. The...
NASA’s Hubble Captures Gorgeous New Photo of a Spiral Galaxy as It Wanders Through the Virgo Cluster
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has released a striking new image of spiral galaxy Messier 88, located about 60 million light‑years away in the Virgo Cluster. The picture highlights the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole—about 100 million times the Sun’s mass—and vivid star‑forming regions....
How the Success of D-Day Hinged on a Weather Forecast
The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 succeeded because a small team of meteorologists identified a brief weather window, prompting General Eisenhower to postpone the assault from June 5. British forecasters predicted stormy conditions, while an American team...
Why High-Bandwidth Memory Is a Bottleneck for AI Chips
AI's rapid expansion has exposed a memory bottleneck, putting high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) at the center of the hardware race. Micron Technology, the only U.S. memory‑chip maker, briefly hit a $1 trillion market valuation as its HBM4 chips promise more than 2.8 TB/s...
Retatrutide Results Spark Questions About How Rapid Weight Loss Affects the Body
Retatrutide, Eli Lilly's next‑generation GLP‑1 agonist, produced a 28.3% average body‑weight loss (about 70 lb) over 80 weeks, rivaling bariatric surgery. The drug’s triple‑receptor action outperforms existing agents like Wegovy and Zepbound, prompting expectations of imminent FDA approval. However, rapid weight...
A New Study Says Homing Pigeon Livers Act Like Compasses. Other Experts Aren’t so Sure
A study published in Science proposes that magnetic immune cells in homing pigeons' livers act as a biological compass, and that chemically removing these macrophages disrupts the birds' ability to navigate home. The researchers observed that drug‑treated pigeons lost direction...
Back-to-Back Chemical Accidents Raise Alarm over EPA Push to Reduce Oversight
Two high‑profile chemical incidents—an overheating methyl methacrylate tank in Garden Grove, California, and a ruptured white‑liquor tank at a Washington paper mill—highlight the dangers of lax oversight. The EPA’s 2024 risk management plan rule, which mandates safety technologies, employee involvement,...
A Quantum Computing System’s Perfect Randomness Could Keep Your Secrets Safe
Researchers at ETH Zurich have demonstrated a two‑qubit system that produces provably perfect randomness, a critical ingredient for secure encryption. By entangling qubits across a 30‑meter tube and performing roughly 1.5 billion Bell tests, they generated randomness that cannot be explained...
The Secret to Immortality Might Be a Sea Cucumber
Researchers have found that amputated tissue from the Atlantic sea cucumber Psolus fabricii can persist for years without dying, displaying traits of biological immortality. In seawater tanks, detached fragments remained viable for over three years, repairing wounds and continuing cell division...
Gigantic ‘Little Red Dot’ Threatens to Upend Cosmic History
Astronomers using JWST have applied spectroastrometry to a "little red dot" 700 million years after the Big Bang and report a central black hole mass of roughly 50 million solar masses. The result, published in Nature, revives the controversial idea that supermassive...
Tiny Quantum Computers Could Help Create Giant Telescopes
Harvard physicists have demonstrated a proof‑of‑concept quantum‑memory system that can link two small optical receivers across a 1.5 km fiber and retrieve an interference pattern, effectively mimicking a telescope with a 1.5 km aperture. The experiment uses silicon‑vacancy defects in diamond to...
Anthropic Asks Religious Thinkers to Help Shape Claude as Pope Warns About AI
Anthropic brought together about 15 religious scholars in March to advise on the moral framework of its Claude chatbot. The meetings aimed to inform Claude’s constitution—a set of guiding principles that the model uses to self‑evaluate its responses. The effort...
Tiny Alien-Like Blue Octopus Discovered Lurking Off the Galapagos Islands
A golf‑ball‑size blue octopus was discovered on a deep‑sea mountain 1,773 meters off the Galápagos Islands during a 2015 expedition aboard the research vessel E/V Nautilus. Researchers used the robotic submersible Hercules and micro‑CT scanning to determine it represented a previously unknown...
The Universe Could Have 18 Possible Shapes
Cosmologists now agree the universe is flat, but flatness admits many possible topologies. Mathematician Werner Nowacki proved there are 18 distinct flat 3‑D shapes, eight of which are non‑orientable and conflict with physics, leaving ten viable candidates ranging from an infinite...
Why Lawyers Keep Citing Fake Cases Invented by AI
Lawyers are increasingly sanctioned for filing briefs that contain AI‑generated, non‑existent case citations. A database compiled by HEC Paris researcher Damien Charlotin lists more than 1,400 court decisions over the past three years that address such AI hallucinations, with a...
Span Wants to Turn Homes Into Mini Data Centers
Span, a smart‑panel startup, unveiled XFRA—a distributed AI compute platform that installs air‑conditioner‑sized units in residential yards. Each node houses 16 Nvidia GPUs, three terabytes of RAM, and consumes about 12.5 kW, meaning roughly 8,000 nodes could match the power draw...
Bixonimania’—The Fake Illness that AI Fell For
Researchers at the University of Gothenburg created a fictitious eye condition called bixonimania and seeded it across a fake university website, a whimsical preprint, and social‑media posts. The fabricated term was ingested by Common Crawl, the primary data source for...
Hantavirus Found in Shocking Number of Pacific Northwest Rodents
Researchers in Washington State and Idaho found that about 10% of 189 rodents sampled carried the Sin Nombre hantavirus, with nearly 30% showing past infection. The study, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, highlights a higher prevalence of the deadly virus in...
NOAA Predicts Quieter Atlantic Hurricane Season for 2026—But the Pacific Is Another Story
NOAA’s 2026 outlook gives the Atlantic a 55% chance of a below‑normal hurricane season, projecting 8‑14 named storms and only one to three major hurricanes. The forecast attributes the reduced Atlantic activity to an anticipated El Niño, which heightens vertical wind...
AI Just Solved an 80-Year-Old ‘Erdős Problem,’ and Mathematicians Are Amazed
OpenAI announced that its internal large‑language model solved the 80‑year‑old unit‑distance problem, a conjecture posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. The AI generated a high‑dimensional lattice construction that beats Erdős’s best known bound, producing a proof that experts deem clever...
NASA’s Plan for a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon Could Change Space Exploration Forever—If It Works
U.S. officials aim to place a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030, a timeline that outpaces a similar China‑Russia effort slated for 2035. Proponents argue nuclear power solves the lunar south‑pole’s 14‑day night, offering reliable, year‑round energy for habitats,...
The U.S. Just Experienced Its Hottest 12 Months on Record
March 2026 was the hottest month on record for the United States, with an average temperature of 50.9°F—9.35°F above the 20th‑century baseline, the first time any month has exceeded the historic norm by that margin. Ten states, including Arizona and...
SpaceX Punts Starship V3 Launch to May 21 as Investigation Opens Into Starbase Worker’s Death
SpaceX has pushed the inaugural flight of its Starship V3 megarocket to the evening of May 21, with a launch window opening at 6:30 p.m. EDT. The delay follows a fatal fall of a contractor at the Starbase facility, prompting an OSHA...
How Scientists Developed a Hantavirus PCR Test in a Weekend
Scientists at Nebraska's Public Health Laboratory rapidly engineered a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for Andes hantavirus over the May 9‑10 weekend. The assay enables detection of viral RNA in blood, allowing identification of infections before symptoms emerge, unlike the CDC’s...
Scientists Catalog the ‘Fractal Dimensions’ of More than 130,000 Islands
A new study of more than 130,000 islands reveals that coastlines are far smoother than previously thought, showing the lowest fractal dimensions among island features. By measuring fractal dimensions across coastline, elevation, size distribution and volume, researchers found that geometric...
Hantavirus Can Persist in Semen for Years, but that Doesn’t Mean It Remains Contagious
Researchers have discovered that Andes hantavirus RNA can persist in semen for up to six years after initial infection. The World Health Organization announced a natural‑history study to determine how long infected individuals remain contagious and to differentiate RNA detection...
Microbe ‘Cities’ May Solve a Key Ocean Mystery
Scientists have identified dense microbial "cities" living inside sinking marine‑snow particles as a key driver of calcite dissolution, weakening the ocean’s ability to lock away carbon. Using a microfluidic chip that mimics marine snow, researchers observed that tightly packed, oxygen‑breathing...
Doubts Grow over Theory that Bird-Watchers’ Trip to Argentine Landfill Sparked Hantavirus Outbreak
Health officials are probing the source of a hantavirus outbreak that sickened 11 passengers on the MV Hondius cruise ship departing Ushuaia, with three deaths. The index cases were a Dutch couple who fell ill weeks after a bird‑watching tour that...
Can Helium-3 Create a ‘Gold Rush’ on the Moon?
Helium‑3, a rare isotope prized for quantum‑computing cooling, advanced medical imaging, and potential fusion fuel, is abundant on the lunar surface where solar wind implants it in ilmenite‑rich regolith. Scientists estimate up to a billion kilograms could be harvested, sparking...
Deep-Earth Diamonds Reveal Trove of Never-Before-Seen Minerals
Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History have identified two previously unknown minerals—bernwoodite and kopylovite—trapped within deep‑mantle diamonds. Advanced laser and X‑ray microscopy allowed them to examine microscopic inclusions that survived the journey from hundreds of kilometers beneath Earth’s...
China’s Yangtze River Has Been ‘Pirating’ Water From the Yellow River for More than a Million Years, Scientists Reveal
New geological research shows that over the past 1.7 million years the Yangtze River has been siphoning water from the Yellow River, averaging about five billion cubic meters per year. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, documents multiple...
NASA’s Apollo Moon Missions Relied on This Computer Scientist and Differential Equations
Margaret Hamilton’s software engineering made the Apollo 11 lunar landing possible by designing a fault‑tolerant onboard computer that could handle overloads and prioritize critical tasks. The guidance computer, with just 74 KB of ROM, solved differential equations in real time using...
Gemstones on Mars—Why the Red Planet Could Be Harboring Rubies, Opals, and More
NASA’s Perseverance rover and orbiting satellites have identified trace amounts of corundum—the mineral family of rubies and sapphires—and microscopic opal‑like silica crystals on Mars. The study attributes the corundum to rapid heating during asteroid impacts rather than Earth‑style plate tectonics,...
Tanking Is Ruining NBA Basketball. Can Math Save It?
The NBA’s draft lottery, which gives the worst‑record teams the best odds at top picks, has spurred intentional losing—or “tanking”—by several franchises, most recently the Washington Wizards. To curb this, the league is considering a “3‑2‑1” lottery that flattens odds...
This Sulfurous Hell World Might Change the Way We Classify Exoplanets
L 98‑59 d, a 1.6‑times‑Earth‑sized world orbiting a red dwarf, shows a scorching 1,500 °C surface and a sulfur‑rich atmosphere that has persisted for roughly five billion years. Observations from TESS, Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope revealed an unusually low density and...
Is Testosterone Therapy Safe and Effective? What We Know
A December FDA expert panel advocated expanding testosterone therapy beyond classic hypogonadism, branding it a multibillion‑dollar preventive‑care opportunity. Recent evidence, notably the 5,200‑patient TRAVERSE trial, found no rise in cardiovascular events among high‑risk men receiving therapeutic doses. However, high‑dose use—often...