Recent Scientific Breakthroughs

Struts of many sizes let metamaterials combine direction-tunable stiffness with evenly spread deformation

After hip or knee replacement, aspirin could not be shown as effective as anticoagulants, nor they as safe as aspirin

Tapirs and anteaters ranging closer to development and waste sites carried more microplastics in their blood

A personalized neoantigen therapy plus pembrolizumab prolonged recurrence-free survival in a phase 3 melanoma trial

Two monkey brain areas format the same signals differently, and stimulating each changed choices differently

Atomic-scale spectra point to a fully opened superconducting gap in oxygen-sufficient bilayer nickelate films

Asked to rate over 4,400 AI-generated ideas, 100-plus group leaders called a quarter interesting

Theory predicts that a local constraint lets a burst of superradiance entangle the emitting atoms

A single atom read out by the cloud next door, after three regimes of light-matter interaction are mapped

In 1.2 million immune cells, a single-cell model found 48.8% more eGenes than a standard pooled pipeline

A fine-mapping method holds up better than existing tools when the reference panel does not match the study

Weakly open quantum systems started in thermal states need extra conserved quantities to show the Mpemba effect

Atom-scale light maps trace a common defect glow in the semiconductor MoS2 to carbon-hydrogen complexes

A new algorithm could make 2020 Census tables more accurate without weakening their privacy protection

Measurements and models indicate the fault behind the 2011 Tohoku quake is locked again, as before it struck

Electron pairing sets in at the pseudogap energy in a cuprate superconductor, noise measurements show

A new X-ray method maps how collagen fibrils and fibres share load inside intact rat spinal discs

Children, adults and AI agents in a Minecraft-like game seem to seek novelty first, then control

A map of 12 glioblastomas finds their cells on one path, from development-like states to injury and low oxygen

Mice that only watched fights later fought more like experienced fighters, with shared brain changes

Separately knocking down 18 autism genes in lab-grown neural cells lowered many of the same other autism genes

An atom simulator running up to 180 qubits finds quantum states that hold off thermalization

Pulsars and a neutron-star merger set a lower mass limit on the extra modes of 'ghostful' quadratic gravity

A gene circuit keyed to a slip in the ribosome's reading frame makes cancer cells kill themselves in mice

Across fifteen devices, 3.79° to 5.76° of twist takes two atom-thin sheets to superconductivity

Across 106 galaxy clusters, MOND needs 4 to 10 times less mass than Newton but still some unseen matter

A laser search for axions at DESY saw none, setting a limit more than 20 times tighter than similar experiments

In four patients, single magnetic pulses to the prefrontal cortex changed firing in 46% of recorded neurons

Valve replacement cut combined 2-year death or heart-failure events to 16.7% from 23.9% in at-risk moderate stenosis

Cervical cancer killed an estimated 369,000 women in 2023, and deaths are forecast to rise by 2050

Anole lizards of closed Caribbean forests raised their heat tolerance by 2 °C on average in a decade

In mice, astrocytes in an early bulbous state release a signal microglia need to eat the synapses beside them

Steatohepatitis resolved in over half of patients analysed on each dose of a GLP-1-glucagon drug, vs 13% on placebo

At 10 years, a registry found no detectable survival difference between stents and bypass surgery

A targeted pill shrank PIK3CA-mutated ovarian clear cell tumours in 35% of evaluable trial patients

A two-target antibody with chemotherapy shrank tumours in 31 of 42 triple-negative breast cancers

X-rays catch a one-handed spin wave in manganese telluride, just as a candidate new kind of magnet predicts

Pretrained on 500 million simulated collisions, one model handles new searches and rediscovers a known particle

Seven genomes from Ethiopia's first Marburg outbreak point to one spillover, then human-to-human spread

Ancient DNA suggests Germanic may have reached Scandinavia some 800 years later than assumed

Single-nucleus maps of 287 muscle biopsies match almost 3,500 trait signals to regulatory variants

Repeated stretches of DNA shape gene activity immune cell type by cell type, across 1,925 people

A magnet with no net magnetization still injects a spin current, and reversing its state flips the signal

A multiferroic oxide keeps both its electric and magnetic order down to four unit cells

A qubit's own jumps pick out the defects that make its environment remember its past states

A proposed way to read a black hole's horizon from merger signals turns out too imprecise to measure it

A white dwarf's gas forms two separate rings, which astronomers propose are fed by two planetary bodies

A neuron surface protein, NRXN3, gives a handle for pulling candidate neuron vesicles from blood

A language-model system simulating a panel of physicians correctly diagnosed 83.2% of NEJM case-conference cases in a benchmark, against 36.1% for generalist physicians.

Coral bacteria make testosterone and progesterone, and giving corals either one shifts their immune genes