Science

For billions of years, the natural world has acted as a silent engineer. It methodically discarded ineffective solutions and refined the good ones. As a result, these mechanisms became so effective…

Mice whose layer 6b neurons had been switched off slept and woke for the same total number of hours as normal mice, but the electrical rhythms running through their brains were slower and weaker,…

Warm water pushes the ricefield eel from female to male through a single temperature-sensitive protein in the ovary, researchers report in eLife. The paper, published on September 7 by Zhi Yang,…

The nerve fibers that report touch from a fingertip are among the longest cells in the body. Their working ends sit in the outer layer of the skin, and everything those ends need has to be carried…

Insulin signaling is one of the tidiest diagrams in cell biology. The hormone lands on its receptor, the receptor trips a relay of enzymes, and at the end of the chain an enzyme called Akt tells the…

Motor and cognitive abilities that depend on the cerebellum were no worse in adults over 80 than in young adults, a research group at KU Leuven reports in the journal eLife. More general measures of…

Jian Li, Peng Yi and colleagues at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School report that switching off a single gene turned human pancreatic duct cells into cells that make insulin, and…

Five free AI chatbots told a cooperative simulated sleep apnea patient to see a specialist in all 350 test conversations, then abandoned that advice in more than a third of conversations when the…

Two teams published large genetic studies of multiple sclerosis in Nature Genetics on Sept. 7, both using patient groups beyond the European-ancestry populations behind most of the field's data. One…

Concentrated sulfuric acid is what a chemist reaches for when the goal is destruction. At 98% by weight it pulls the water out of sugar, chars paper to carbon and eats through metal. It is also the…

Keep your eyes on this word and notice, without moving them, what is happening at the outer limit of what you can see. A doorway to the left. Someone crossing the room at the far right. That band of…

Novartis reported on September 4, 2026 that its Phase III trial of pelacarsen, a drug designed to lower lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a), did not reduce cardiovascular events in patients who already had…