Life
Four-Winged Raptor May Have Hunted China’s Earliest Birds
The bird bones at Changma come in clusters, broken and crushed into tight little pellets, the kind of thing a modern owl coughs up after a meal.
Jun 4, 2026
Health
Your Saliva Carries a Chemical Fingerprint of a Sleepless Night
Spit into a tube. That, in the not too distant future, might be all it takes for a police officer at the roadside to know whether you have been awake for the past 24 hours.
Jun 4, 2026
Health
Engineered Hookworms Delivered an Antibody Into Hamsters in Proof-of-Concept Study
Genetically modified hookworms produced an antibody that entered the bloodstream and partially neutralised tetrodotoxin in hamsters. No therapeutic use in humans has been established.
Jun 3, 2026
Technology
Yeast Can Now Be 3D Printed Into Renewable Walls and Light Screens
First you kill the yeast. Heat it to 80C for half an hour until nothing in it is alive, then fold it together with wood fibres, a little seaweed extract, some plant-derived glycerol and water until the whole lot turns into a soft, jelly-like paste.
Jun 3, 2026
Health
Ultra-Processed Foods May Harm Health Through Processing Itself, Not Just Poor Nutrition
Roughly half of what lands in the average American adult's shopping trolley, and around 60 percent of what a child eats, now comes from foods built in factories rather than kitchens.
Jun 3, 2026
Technology
Renewable-Powered AI Isn't As Clean As It Looks, According to UN Scientists
Swap a data centre's coal-fired electricity for bioenergy and, on average, you slash its carbon footprint by around 70 percent.
Jun 3, 2026
Technology
The Cat Stays Alive: Reading a Quantum Chip Without Wrecking It
Buried in a sliver of silicon sits a single atom of antimony, and inside it, a nucleus spinning in one of eight possible states.
Jun 3, 2026
Brain & Behavior
A New Theory Says DMT Entities Might Be Real, and Proposes How to Test It
About 45 percent of people who smoke a sufficient dose of DMT report the same strange thing: they are no longer alone.
Jun 3, 2026
Earth & Environment
Rising Seas May Turn Mangrove Forests From Carbon Sinks Into Carbon Sources
A mangrove keeps a careful appointment with the sea. Twice a day the tide climbs through its roots, drops a fresh skim of mud, and retreats, and the tree builds itself a little higher on the leavings.
Jun 3, 2026
Technology
AI Identifies a Ray's Prey From the Sound of Cracking Shells
A whitespotted eagle ray does not eat a clam quietly. It pins the shell against crushing plates in its jaw and breaks it apart in a rapid sequence of fractures, each one a sharp broadband snap that travels through the water.
Jun 3, 2026
Health
A One-Atom Shuffle Reveals Hidden Cancer-Drug Pocket That AI Couldn't Find
Two molecules sat side by side on the chemists' screen, near-identical twins. The same scaffold, the same atoms, the same everything, save for a single oxygen-bearing group that had shuffled one position over on a ring.
Jun 3, 2026
Physics
Physicists Finally Pin Down the Proton's Size and Rule Out New Physics
A proton is a fussy thing to measure. It has no hard edge, no surface you can lay a ruler against, just a smear of positive charge a hair under one quadrillionth of a metre across.
Jun 2, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Mouse Study Identifies Habenula Cells That Track Missing Rewards
Researchers identified neurons in the mouse lateral habenula whose activity tracked the size of an omitted reward. Human relevance and any clinical application remain uncertain.
Jun 2, 2026
Technology
How Pushing a Material to Its Breaking Point Could Unlock the Quantum Entanglement Hidden Inside It
Inside a tiny box lined with mirrors, light bounces back and forth with nowhere to go.
Jun 2, 2026