Science

A UK-led group reported on October 1, 2026, that bat coronaviruses able to use the widest range of animal receptors all sit in the same branch of the family as SARS-CoV-2, and that those are also the…

Two children sit across a marble game. One of them takes a turn and runs into trouble: a box that will not open, or a container that tips its marbles onto the floor. The other child has already been…

Researchers reported Oct. 1 in Scientific Reports that the situation a group of elephants is in can be worked out from the sound of several of them rumbling over one another, not only from calls made…

Siyu Liu, Douglas R. Higgs and colleagues at the University of Oxford have found the DNA switches that keep an embryonic blood gene shut off after early pregnancy, and report that disabling two of…

A Google DeepMind team has hidden a mark inside proteins designed by artificial intelligence, so that the molecule itself shows a machine made it. The system, called SynthIDBio, appeared in Nature on…

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York tracked 9,419 meals eaten by 173 patients hospitalized for a blood stem cell transplant and report in Nature that sweets eaten while…

A fossil named in 1990 as the earliest known reptile is not a reptile at all. Writing in Nature on September 30, 2026, Ben Igielman of the University of Oxford, Roger Benson of the American Museum of…

Researchers have filmed living Asgard archaea, single-celled microbes without a nucleus that are considered the closest known relatives of complex cells, crawling across a glass surface. The work was…

Fix your eyes on a single word on this page. The letters at the center of your gaze are handled by one patch of tissue at the back of your head, the clutter out at the edge of your vision by another,…

The biotechnology company uniQure reported four-year results on Sept. 29 for 12 patients given a high dose of its experimental gene therapy for Huntington's disease. On the study's pre-chosen main…

Ask a biologist to sketch the bacteria that swim along magnetic field lines and you will get much the same drawing every time: a cell with a neat row of tiny bar magnets inside it, lined up nose to…

Recording directly from the surface of the brain in nine patients undergoing awake surgery for brain tumors, a team at Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, identified which syllable a person was…