South Korea's total fertility rate hit 0.72 last year. Japan's hovered around 1.2. Sweden, long held up as a model for making work and family life compatible, has watched its own rate tumble faster than almost anyone anticipated.
Mar 2, 2026
The electrons inside a Mott insulator are, in a sense, paralysed. Repelling each other so strongly that none can move without displacing a neighbour, they sit locked in place — insulating despite what band theory alone might predict.
Mar 2, 2026
The eye produces about six to ten microlitres of tears per minute. The fluid bathing your joints, the liquid that cushions your brain, the secretions that line…
Mar 2, 2026
Haochi Wu wasn't looking at academic literature when the question first caught him.
Mar 2, 2026
The tumour cells looked clean. Under the microscope, they registered negative for CD70, the molecule that Sophie Hanina's engineered immune cells were programmed to hunt.
Feb 27, 2026
Every time a tick buries its mouthparts into your skin, something chemically audacious is happening.
Feb 27, 2026
The nitrile glove sits in a pressure vessel in Aarhus, shredded into small pieces, bathed in solvent under 30 bars of hydrogen.
Feb 27, 2026
Somewhere north of 28 million men in the United States played organised tackle football at some point in their lives.
Feb 27, 2026
Scan your genome and you'll find bits of Neanderthal scattered through it like old furniture in an attic.
Feb 27, 2026
Hold out your hand, palm down. Spread your fingers. Now clench them into a fist.
Feb 27, 2026
Two adjacent fields in Jiangxi Province, China, grow different crops — one peanuts, one rice.
Feb 27, 2026
The ant was eating something. Its body curved backward, mandibles pressed against what looks like a worm or perhaps a neuropteran larva, frozen in that posture for 99 million years inside a piece of Burmese amber the size of a matchbox.
Feb 27, 2026
Japan receives its rain unevenly. In a given year, the southern island of Kyushu might endure a typhoon season that dumps more water in a week than some…
Feb 27, 2026
Somewhere in the pancreas of a person who feels perfectly well, a cluster of rogue cells is already having conversations it shouldn't be having.
Feb 27, 2026
