Check Out the Newest Fluorescent Amphibian
Researchers have discovered that the well‑known fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra) fluoresces blue‑green under ultraviolet light. The glow originates from defensive secretions in the parotid glands, not from skin pigments, and is absent in juveniles whose glands are immature. Fluorophores identified in the secretions appear to be novel compounds distinct from the salamander’s known steroidal alkaloids. Scientists suggest the fluorescence may serve communication or warning functions in low‑light environments.
Ornithologists Describe New Bird Species From Remote Indonesian Islands
Ornithologists have split the cinnamon‑tailed fantail into two species after discovering a distinct vocal signature on Indonesia’s Babar Islands. The newly described bird, Rhipidura laguceria, differs from its Tanimbar counterpart mainly in song structure, despite only subtle plumage variations. Researchers...
Plants Could Be Used to Grow Medicines in Space, Study Shows
UC San Diego engineers have created a reusable method to grow and harvest pharmaceutical compounds from plants under simulated space conditions. By extracting cowpea mosaic virus particles from the leaf apoplast, the technique avoids destroying the plant and can be...
Washing Machines Could Support Skin Health for First Nations People – if We Get the Wash Settings Right
A systematic review finds washing at ≥60 °C for 15 minutes kills skin pathogens, a key step for reducing infections in remote First Nations communities. Current hot‑water limits (max 50 °C) and high machine costs hinder effective laundering. Community laundry facilities, supported by a recent A$11.4 million...
77 Headless Skeletons Found in a Field Date Back 7,000 Years
Archaeologists uncovered a mass burial of 78 individuals at the Neolithic settlement of Vráble, Slovakia, with 77 skeletons missing their heads. The remains date to 5250‑4950 BCE, belonging to the Linear Pottery culture, one of Europe’s earliest farming societies. Researchers argue...
Honeybees Inspire a Super-Efficient Navigation System for Drones
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have created Bee‑Nav, a bio‑inspired navigation system that lets lightweight drones return home without GPS or heavy mapping. The method mimics honeybee odometry and short learning flights, using a neural network as small as...
Twisted Stacking Lets 2D Conductor Keep Single-Layer Performance in Bulk Form
Researchers at KAIST and the University of Oregon have introduced a twisted‑stacking approach that preserves the single‑layer electronic characteristics of a 2D conductive metal‑organic framework when assembled into bulk form. The new material, Ni₃(HITrip)₂, maintains a Dirac Kagome band structure...
Additive Research Update: Recyclable Resins, Musical Metasurfaces, Secret Spices, and More
Researchers at EPFL unveiled a volumetric 3D‑printing platform that is 70 times more efficient than prior holographic methods, enabling millimeter‑scale objects to solidify in seconds and centimeter‑scale parts in minutes, even with living cells embedded. A team from Hunan University discovered...
Van Der Waals Forces Can Play Unexpected Role in Thin Film Properties
Researchers at North Carolina State University used van der Waals forces to tune the thickness, strain state, and domain architecture of ferroelectric tin selenide (SnSe) thin films grown on a molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) monolayer. The strong vdW interaction, enabled by close lattice...
Donut Lab’s ‘Solid-State’ Battery Exposed as Regular Li-Ion in Damning Investigation
An investigation led by battery researcher Ziroth, with input from over 20 experts, has demonstrated that Donut Lab’s touted solid‑state battery is actually a conventional lithium‑ion cell. The analysis of voltage curves and cell‑expansion data shows an energy density of...
Research Uncovers Novel Electronic Properties in Quantum Material
Physicists from Florida State University and international partners have identified unconventional superconductivity and a quantum anomalous Hall effect in rhombohedral graphene, a few‑layer carbon crystal with chiral stacking. The study shows that electrons and holes localize on opposite surfaces, creating...
GLP-1 Drugs Tackle Both Skin Inflammation and Metabolism in Psoriasis
A recent narrative review in Frontiers in Immunology finds that GLP‑1 receptor agonists such as liraglutide and semaglutide improve psoriasis severity and systemic inflammation, independent of weight loss. Evidence in psoriatic arthritis (PsA) remains limited to a single small study,...
Your Empty Cuppa Could Capture Carbon
Researchers at Aarhus University have devised a method to up‑cycle discarded polystyrene into solid amine‑based sorbents for carbon capture. The technique brominates the polymer and swaps bromine for amine groups using gold and copper catalysts, creating a porous material that...
Physicists Create New Family of Schrödinger-Cat States
Physicists at the University of Oxford have demonstrated a new family of Schrödinger‑cat states by engineering superpositions of highly nonclassical motional components in a single trapped ion. The technique entangles the ion’s internal qubit with its vibrational motion, then uses...
Europe Pours Money Into Ocean Research as Trump Guts Science Funding
The European Commission unveiled the OceanEye program, allocating roughly $101 million to boost ocean observation and data analytics as the United States dismantles its $368 million NSF‑run coastal monitoring network. OceanEye is part of the Horizon Europe research framework and aims to...
Tabletop Experiment Helps Reconcile Fundamental Physics
Assistant Professor Haocun Yu and her team published a Physical Review Letters paper describing a 50‑kilometer fiber‑optic interferometer that fits on a tabletop and can detect gravitationally induced phase shifts in single‑photon experiments. The device achieves the stability and phase...
UN Warns Rapidly Changing Ocean Putting Future of Humanity at Risk
The United Nations warned that without immediate, coordinated action the ocean’s health will continue to decline, jeopardizing climate stability, food security and the wellbeing of billions. Its new World Oceans Assessment highlights that only 8.4 percent of marine areas are protected,...
Fighting Parkinson’s by Restoring Protein Degradation
Researchers identified the proteasome activator Blm10 (human PA200) as a key factor that restores degradation of α‑synuclein, the protein that drives Parkinson’s disease. In yeast, Blm10 stability rises when phosphorylated α‑synuclein (S129) blocks autophagy, and massive overexpression of Blm10 clears...
Frozen Rat Chromosome Springs Back to Life Inside a Mouse Embryo
Japanese researchers have revived a single frozen rat chromosome by transplanting it into a mouse oocyte, creating a viable rat‑mouse hybrid embryo that reaches the blastocyst stage. The chromosome, extracted from rat blood cells frozen for over a year, remained...
Some Pterosaurs May Have Boasted Bold Iridescence
Scientists analyzing a 120‑million‑year‑old Sinopterus dongi fossil from northeast China have identified layered melanosomes that would have produced iridescent greens and magentas. The discovery, published on bioRxiv, marks the first evidence that pterosaurs displayed structural coloration similar to modern birds....
Thanks to Natural Selection, Indigenous Andeans May Digest Potatoes Better than Anyone Else in the World, Study Finds
Indigenous Andeans in Peru carry an average of ten copies of the salivary amylase (AMY1) gene, the highest worldwide, a trait linked to the region’s early potato domestication about 10,000 years ago. Global populations average seven copies, highlighting a strong...
'A Disease Anywhere Can Be a Disease Everywhere Tomorrow Morning': Public Health Expert on Ebola and the Threat of Future...
The WHO has declared a public‑health emergency as an Ebola outbreak driven by the Bundibugyo virus spreads across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, with 515 confirmed cases and 91 deaths in the DRC and 19 cases with...
Scientists Use Ancient DNA to Reveal How Natural Selection Shaped West Eurasians over 10,000 Years
Researchers led by Harvard’s Ali Akbari analyzed DNA from 15,836 ancient West Eurasians, sequencing over 10,000 genomes to map directional selection across the past 10,000 years. They identified hundreds of variants influencing immunity, diet, blood type, disease risk and traits...
NASA Advances Interoperable Space Networks with Successful PExT Demonstration
NASA completed the primary technology demonstration of its Polylingual Experimental Terminal (PExT), showing that a single Ka‑band terminal aboard a York Space Systems satellite can hop between government relays and commercial networks such as Viasat and SES. The test used...
Ultra-Thin MoS₂ Computer Packs 1,400 Transistors Onto One Chip
Researchers from Nanjing University, Suzhou Laboratory and Huawei have built a fully functional computer using the 2‑D semiconductor molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂). The chip integrates more than 1,400 transistors on a single die, achieving a density of 9,336 transistors per mm² and...
Black Hole Feeding Bursts May Explain JWST's Little Red Dots in Early Universe
A new theoretical study posted on arXiv argues that the mysterious “Little Red Dots” observed by JWST are early black holes undergoing brief, super‑Eddington feeding bursts. The authors model black‑hole seeds forming before redshift 20 and growing to 10⁵‑10⁶ solar masses...
Geoscientists Find Vast Fan-Shaped Structure Beneath Antarctica’s Ice
Researchers using seismic, gravity and topographic data identified a 2,000‑km fan‑shaped subglacial province in East Antarctica, named the East Antarctic Fan‑Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). The province unifies well‑known basins such as Wilkes, Aurora and the Lake Vostok basin into a...
Half the World's Reservoirs Could Be Clogged up with Dirt by 2060
An analysis of 550,000 reservoirs using satellite data and machine learning finds that each decade the world loses over 7% of freshwater storage to sediment buildup. At the current rate, more than half of global reservoirs will be functionally dead...
CRISPR Shreds Undruggable Cancer Cells with Precision
Researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute have engineered a CRISPR‑Cas12a2 system that detects mutant p53 mRNA and triggers chromatin shredding, selectively killing cancer cells. The approach demonstrated potent tumor regression in mouse models of lung and liver cancer while sparing...
A Drug May Help People on GLP-1 Meds Preserve Muscle
A proof‑of‑concept study published in Nature Medicine shows that the experimental myostatin‑blocking antibody apitegromab can halve lean‑mass loss in patients taking tirzepatide, a GLP‑1 weight‑loss drug. In a 24‑week trial of 102 overweight or obese adults, both groups lost similar...
Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain's 'Core Algorithm'
Jeff Bezos has invested $500 million in Flourish, a neuro‑AI startup now valued at $2.5 billion, to pursue brain‑inspired artificial intelligence that learns continuously and consumes far less power than current large language models. Founded by neuroscientist Thomas Reardon and former Amazon...
WHO's New Estimates of Foodborne Diseases May Improve Global Prevention
The World Health Organization released its latest global burden of food‑borne diseases, estimating 57.1 million disability‑adjusted life years lost in 2021 across 42 hazards. The estimates, produced by WHO’s Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group with methodological input from DTU National...
A Teaspoon of Material From a Neutron Star — the Collapsed Remnant of a Massive Star that Has Compressed All...
A teaspoon of material from a neutron star would weigh about two billion tonnes, far exceeding the combined mass of all humans. The density of neutron‑star matter is roughly 4 × 10^17 kg per cubic metre, making a sugar‑cube‑sized sample comparable to the...
How Artemis II Livestreamed Hi-Def Videos and Images From the Moon to Earth
NASA’s Orion Artemis II spacecraft used the MIT‑Lincoln Laboratory Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O) to beam high‑definition video and photos from lunar orbit back to Earth via a laser‑com link. The system achieved up to 260 Mbps, downlinking roughly half a...
If the Universe Is Infinite — Which Current Cosmology Suggests Is Genuinely Possible — Then Somewhere Out There, Beyond the...
Current cosmology, grounded in inflationary theory and flat‑space observations, allows for an infinite universe beyond the observable 93 billion‑light‑year horizon. In such an infinite expanse, the finite number of quantum configurations means every possible arrangement—including exact duplicates of Earth and individual...
Melanoma Rates and Mortality Peak Among Older Adults in Florida, Study Finds
A Florida Atlantic University study of adults 65 and older reveals that melanoma mortality peaks among older men, who die at roughly twice the rate of women, while incidence has remained steady from 2018 to 2021. The research also shows...
Induced Cortical On/Off Periods Mimic Sleep Functions
Researchers have shown for the first time that cortical on/off periods—brief, coordinated pauses in neuronal firing—can be artificially induced in awake mice using optogenetics. The induced states reproduced hallmark sleep functions, including synaptic downscaling and improved performance on memory‑dependent tasks....
STAT+: Novo Underwhelmed by Drug It Once Fought Pfizer For
Novo Nordisk is downplaying an obesity drug it once contested with Pfizer, signaling a shift in its confidence about the product’s market potential. The drug, previously seen as a flagship GLP‑1 therapy, now faces stiff competition from emerging rivals. Meanwhile,...
How Implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces Are Pushing the Boundaries of Precision Die Bonding
Implantable brain‑computer interfaces (BCIs) are transitioning from lab demos to medical products, with companies like Neuralink, Paradromics, Synchron and China’s Neuracle advancing high‑density neural implants. The core engineering hurdle is assembling ultra‑delicate microelectronics that must survive years of exposure to...
Why Does One Side of the Moon Have a Lot of Craters, While the Other Does Not?
The Moon’s near side hosts extensive dark lava plains, or maria, while the far side is dominated by rugged highlands and craters. These maria formed when massive early impacts created basins that later filled with molten lava, especially on the...
Ultrathin Diamond Layer Boosts Performance of High-Power Electronics
MIT researchers have demonstrated an ultrathin single‑crystal diamond interposer that embeds gallium‑nitride (GaN) dielets, dramatically improving thermal management in high‑power chips. The diamond layer spreads heat, keeping GaN and silicon at the same temperature while avoiding the parasitic capacitance of...
South Korea: University Research Team Unveils AI Model to Predict Virulence of Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus
Sungkyunkwan University researchers unveiled DeepTYLCV, an AI model that predicts the virulence of Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus (TYLCV) directly from viral genome sequences. The hybrid system blends transformer‑based language embeddings with a multi‑scale convolutional neural network, surpassing the earlier...
Listening to How Plants Talk, Scream and Cry
At the 3rd Biotechnology Conference in Valencia, the Institute of Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology (IBMCP) unveiled its Plant Ultrasound Atlas, the world’s largest collection of ultrasonic recordings from crops. The AI‑driven database, now over 30,000 hours of data, can...
Diabetes Drug Dramatically Lowers Heart Failure Risk in Genetic Carriers
Researchers at Mass General Brigham and the Broad Institute found that dapagliflozin, a diabetes drug, slashes heart‑failure hospitalizations by roughly 80% in patients carrying rare cardiomyopathy‑linked genetic variants. The analysis of the DECLARE‑TIMI 58 trial identified 121 such carriers among 12,685...
A Hairdresser Made a Revolutionary Heat-Proof Plastic. The Secret Formula Died With Him—Maybe.
In 1990 a BBC segment showcased Starlite, a hairdresser‑invented polymer that resisted temperatures up to 1,200 °C while keeping an egg’s interior cool. The material’s intumescent carbon‑foam mechanism attracted aerospace interest, including NASA, but inventor Maurice Ward never disclosed the formula...
New Peer-Reviewed Study by Over 20 Protein Experts Urges Rethinking Dietary Protein Recommendations Beyond Simply “Eat More Protein” – Reported...
A new peer‑reviewed study authored by more than 20 protein nutrition experts, highlighted by the National Pork Board, challenges the simplistic "eat more protein" mantra. The researchers argue that recommendations should consider protein quality, distribution across meals, and individual factors...
All Solar Cell Efficiencies at a Glance – Updated
The UNSW‑led research team released Version 68 of the Solar Cell Efficiency Tables in the July 2026 issue of Joule, now open‑access and published biannually. The update adds 21 new records, highlighted by Longi’s 28.1% efficiency on a 140 cm² silicon cell and...
Using a Bird’s Structural-Color Trick to Color Solar Modules
Chinese researchers have created quasi‑ordered photonic pigments that color photovoltaic (PV) modules by scattering light rather than absorbing it. The pigments, made from silica microspheres and polyacrylate resin, can be tuned to produce blue, cyan or gray‑white hues while letting...
STAT+: Combination of Pancreatic Cancer Drugs From Tango, Revolution Leads to High Response Rate
Revolution Medicines' KRAS G12C inhibitor daraxonrasib, already highlighted for pancreatic cancer, was paired with Tango Therapeutics' epigenetic drug vopimetostat in a new study. The early‑stage trial reported durable responses in the large majority of participants, with significant tumor reductions observed....
Heat Breaks the Rules at the Nanoscale and Scientists Used It to Their Advantage
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, together with Stanford and Purdue collaborators, demonstrated that gold‑patterned metamaterials can increase near‑field radiative heat transfer up to fourfold across nanometer‑scale gaps, as reported in Nature. By engineering microscopic structures that resonate with surface phonon...