Stay informed about scientific discoveries, research developments and new findings from around the world.
For parents whose children have just entered kindergarten or first grade, new fall routines can bring excitement—and some anxiety.
The Van Allen radiation belts are huge, doughnut-shaped regions of highly energetic charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetosphere. These charged particles play a major role in space weather, so studying them is important for predicting and managing risks to satellites, astronauts, power grids and other infrastructure.
Patricia and James Poitras ’63, longtime MIT supporters, have launched a fellowship program for graduate students and postdocs studying major mental illness, expanding their MIT philanthropy to directly support early-career scientists. The commitment establishes 50 two-year fellowships through the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Five fellowships will be awarded every year for the next decade, creating a long-term talent pipeline focused specifically on psychiatric disorders.The $10 million gift is the latest in a series of philanthropic investments from the Poitras family to strengthen MIT’s capacity to address the growing bur...
Sheep grazing, rather than honey bees, could be the bigger threat to wild pollinators on Scotland's moorlands, according to a new University of Bristol-led study. The research, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, has found that grazing in spring can remove much of the nectar emerging bumblebees need, while commercial honey bee hives introduced during the summer heather flowering period have a much smaller impact.
Which genes need to be controlled to guide a stem cell toward a desired cell type or modulate an immune cell's inflammatory response? A Korean research team has developed a general-purpose computational framework that identifies the key targets needed to steer a cell toward a desired state with a single temporary intervention, without permanently altering its genes.
During the production of fermented products such as kefir, Parmesan, or mountain cheese, as well as in the production of protein powders, bitter-tasting peptides can form, which impair the taste and thus the acceptability of the products. A research team led by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich has now developed and successfully tested an AI-based method that can predict the bitterness of peptides. It also makes it possible to design new, bitter-tasting peptides from scratch. This is another important step forward in taste and food research.
Rice bran is a plentiful agricultural byproduct that is often underused, but research from the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station shows it could be a source of biodegradable food packaging with built-in antibacterial properties.
The more astronomers learn about the universe's earliest galaxies, the stranger they seem. Many of their surprising properties may be explained by differences between their massive stars and those in galaxies like our own Milky Way. A new University of Utah-led survey with the Hubble Space Telescope is shedding light on the stellar astrophysics operating in early galaxies.
Kristen Eichensehr. Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer Nation & World Old global order has been ‘ruptured.’ What will new one look like? Law School initiative examines U.S. national security, role of Congress, emergence of AI in bid to prepare future leaders amid seismic shifts Liz Mineo Harvard Staff Writer September 22, 2026 7 min read Early this year, in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada declared that there had been a “rupture” in the rules-based global system of military, economic, and diplomatic alliances by the West, an arrangement that has helped preserve peace for more than 80 years. Carney’s speech arrived in respon...
An interdisciplinary team of researchers has created an open-source website for learning what different organisms eat and what eats them. The site—called Who Eats Whom—draws on data from a worldwide citizen science platform and serves as both a valuable resource for ecological research and an educational tool to advance public understanding of the global food web.
Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. To prevent the results from being misused, the company kept them secret. That backfired
A research team led by Professor Jung-Il Hong of the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST has successfully used current pulses to alter the spin configuration within a ferrimagnetic material, lowering its "compensation temperature"—the temperature at which opposing magnetizations cancel each other out—by up to approximately 110 K.
When is a billiard ball not a billiard ball? When mathematicians get involved and view a popular game as a model computer.
Hydrogen—the lightest atom—does the heavy lifting when it comes to important chemical reactions. It can be stored and released as clean fuel, and its movements help catalysts build medicines, fertilizers and materials. One way hydrogen is available for use is through a hydride—a hydrogen (H) atom bound to a metal. Yet with standard tools, this metal-bound atom can be hard to find in the structure.
Virtual reality (VR) could be a new tool to help students with dyslexia learn English vocabulary more effectively than conventional instruction alone, according to a pilot study involving 30 learners published in the International Journal of Innovation and Learning. Dyslexia is a learning disability that primarily affects reading and related language skills.
In one of the first major discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, scientists have revealed a previously unknown galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Described in a study that hasn’t been peer-reviewed, the galaxy, named Aquarius IV, is one of the lightest, faintest and farthest satellite galaxies ever seen. This dim cluster of ancient stars was discovered on the extreme periphery of the Milky Way in early test data from the Rubin Observatory, offering a glimpse of the telescope's impressive abilities and shedding new light on our cosmic neighborhood. Ultrafaint dwarf galaxies (UFDGs) are among the tiniest and faintest galaxies in the universe. These dim little clusters contain at ...
The World Health Organization (WHO) regards antimicrobial resistance, including antibiotic resistance, as one of the world's major health challenges. A new fundamental understanding of antibiotic resistance could therefore potentially have a far-reaching impact on global public health, animal health and the environment.
The origins of the earliest life on Earth, prior to the rise of oxygen and photosynthesis, remain a mystery. Graveyards in brine pools at the bottom of the Red Sea may hold some answers.
Exoplanets are exotic worlds orbiting distant stars far beyond our solar system. Ever since the first ones were discovered in the 1990s, astronomers have turned their attention to these distant worlds to understand more about them. Now, for the first time, scientists have detected radio signals coming directly from one of these planets, a massive gas giant named β Pictoris b.
The fall equinox is Tuesday, when light and darkness split the day evenly. It marks the beginning of fall for the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
How much can we really trust a measurement? And how much data do researchers need to collect to draw reliable conclusions? Mohammad Reza Seydi at Umeå University has developed and tested new statistical methods to provide better answers to those questions.
Recent heat waves in Europe have been intensified by the greenhouse gases emitted since nations committed to limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to a Sep. 22 study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The ongoing El Niño is breaching the "super" threshold as Earth crosses into unprecedented climate territory. El Niño, officially underway as of June 11, is a climate pattern that's injecting extra heat into our already-warming world, threatening disruptive weather across the globe and a humanitarian crisis in some regions.While El Niño is part of a natural multiyear climate cycle, scientists have noticed that it has been rapidly strengthening like never before, intensified by human-driven climate change, and putting stressed natural systems under extra strain.In a new update this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center continues to foreca...
Researchers have developed an organoid-on-a-chip technology that verifies the efficacy of Parkinson's disease treatments in real time. The technology combines a stem cell–derived "mini-brain" with a nanoplasmonic sensor engineered to maximize light–matter interaction.