Science & Technology

A major challenge in human genetics is understanding which parts of the genome drive specific traits or contribute to disease risk. This challenge is even greater for genetic variants found in the 98% of the genome that does not encode proteins. A new …

Automation uncovers combinations of amino acids that feed two bacterial species and could tell us much more about the 90% of bacteria that humans have hardly studied. An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific exp…

New research deepens the understanding of Earth’s crust by testing and ultimately eliminating one popular hypothesis about why continental crust is lower in iron and more oxidized compared to oceanic crust. The iron-poor composition of continental crus…

Phytosterols are good for your health, but humans and other animals are not able to make them themselves, only plants can. To acquire phytosterols, humans are increasingly turning to supplements, green smoothies, or a Mediterranean diet with plenty of …

New research begins to unravel the role dust plays in nourishing global ocean ecosystems while helping regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

An international team of researchers has developed a comprehensive manual for engineering spin dynamics in nanomagnets — an important step toward advancing spintronic and quantum-information technologies.

Proteins that act like air traffic controllers, managing the flow of signals in and out of human cells, have been observed for the first time with unprecedented detail using advanced microscopy techniques. New findings could inform the development of b…

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can create proteins not found in nature using generative diffusion, the same technology behind popular image-creation platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney.

Researchers discover a unique two-component molecular motor that uses a kind of renewable chemical energy to pull vesicles toward membrane-bound organelles.

For decades, scientists have used the amount of seaweed at the ocean’s surface as a proxy for the health of coral reefs below. However, a new global study of more than 1,200 marine locations over a 16-year period reveals that this approach has been mis…

When the seeds of plants such as pea and sunflower are biofortified with zinc, the seedlings they quickly produce — harvested as microgreens — could both help to mitigate global malnutrition and boost the odds of people surviving a catastrophe.

Perovskite solar cells (PVSCs) are a promising alternative to traditional silicon-based solar cells because of their high power-conversion efficiency and low cost. However, one of the major challenges in their development has been achieving long-term s…

The Beatles famously sang, ‘Money can’t buy me love,’ but married couples who manage their finances together may love each other longer, according to new research.

Researchers have exposed roundworms (a well-established model organism in biological research) to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of drugs used for treating depression and anxiety. Surprisingly, this treatment improved the qual…

Storing data in DNA sounds like science fiction, yet it lies in the near future. Experts expect the first DNA data center to be up and running within five to ten years. Data won’t be stored as zeros and ones in a hard drive but in the base pairs that m…

In the first in-human clinical trial, scientists used a novel, skull-implantable ultrasound device to open the blood-brain barrier and repeatedly permeate large, critical regions of the human brain to deliver chemotherapy that was injected intravenousl…

New guidance may help doctors correctly diagnose hoarding disorder. Hoarding disorder affects around 2% of the population but remains a largely misunderstood mental health condition. It was only added to the International Classification of Diseases in …

Researchers find mutations of the Foxp2 gene disrupt the formation of synapses in the brain’s striatum, which plays important roles in the control of movement, in mice. A new study sheds light on how Foxp2 controls speech production.

A ‘beautiful effect’ predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar — a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to an astrophysicist.

The young star TW Hydrae is playing ‘shadow puppets’ with scientists observing it with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In 2017, astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the…