Science

A study in mice has pulled apart two effects of psilocybin that normally arrive together: the rewiring of connections between brain cells, and the head twitching that researchers use as a rodent…

Researchers have described a new Neanderthal from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, deposited about 75,000 years ago, raising the minimum number of individuals placed in one small spot in the cave to…

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute reported Oct. 15, 2026, in PLOS Medicine that older US adults who ate the most ultra-processed food were no more likely to develop colorectal cancer than…

The body that defines the world's civil time has decided to stop adding leap seconds to it. The General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted Resolution 5, which makes continuous UTC effective…

An Andean condor and a trumpeter swan are about as heavy as flying animals get, and they are almost exactly as heavy as each other: roughly 11 kilograms apiece. By the rules printed in textbooks,…

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design have designed protein-cutting enzymes from scratch, and report that 13 of the 69 designs work, including inside living…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded the approved use of the bladder cancer drug Anktiva on Oct. 14, 2026, to cover adults whose cancer has not spread into the bladder's muscle and no…

There are two ways for a fish to end up among the smallest vertebrates on Earth. One is to shrink in proportion. The result is a tiny animal otherwise built like its larger relatives, with everything…

Researchers in China have described a Late Jurassic fossil that sits near the base of the bird family tree and, they report, could not fly. The animal, named Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, comes from the…

A fungus that survived antifungal treatment in two critically ill London patients carried none of the gene mutations usually blamed for that failure, according to a paper published Oct. 15, 2026, in…

Physicists in China have turned the conducting edge of one crystal into a microscope probe sensitive to the spin of single electrons, and used it to gather evidence that the top layer of a second…

Chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have changed the chemistry of solid polyethylene at its surface alone, leaving the material underneath…