Science

Science

Sources told the publication that a team in Shenzhen completed the prototype of an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine earlier this year and it is allegedly now undergoing testing. The EUV machine was reportedly made by former engineers from Dutch semiconductor supplier ASML. Reuters states that China is targeting production of its own EUV chips beginning in 2028, although other experts have projected 2030 as a more likely date.

After a year of back and forth, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire who has paid to go to space twice, to head the space agency. His confirmation comes at a pivotal moment for NASA, which is under mounting pressure from both budget cuts and technical hurdles that together could scuttle its most ambitious missions.

The ordered state is a low-entropy state, and entropy measures the system's proximity to the most probable (equilibrium) state. Therefore, a system is "far from equilibrium" if its components are statistically correlated, because correlation among components is order. When parts are correlated rather than independent, you have structure.The system occupies a state that's improbable relative to chance. You can predict something about one part by knowing about another.

Alameda, California-based Science is aiming to improve on current perfusion systems that continuously circulate blood through vital organs when they can no longer function on their own. The technology is used to preserve organs for transplant and as a life-support measure for patients when the heart and lungs stop working, but it's clunky and costly. Science wants to make a smaller, more portable system that could provide long-term support.

A unique archaeological site at Pompeii, Italy, reveals the secrets of peculiarly durable Roman building materials.

Astronomers may have discovered a never-before-seen cosmic explosion that effectively combines a supernova with a kilonovathe blast that results when two dead, dense stars collide. When massive stars run out of fuel for nuclear fusion, they collapse, triggering a huge explosion called a supernova that blasts light out into space. These cataclysms sometimes leave behind a small dead corea dense object made mostly of neutrons called a neutron star.

A team of researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard began to suspect nearly two decades ago that so-called "emerging diseases" such as Ebola and Lassa virus were not quite what they seemed. Rather than being newly evolved contagions, mounting evidence suggested they were ancient pathogens that had circulated among humans for thousands of years. What really was emerging was accurate diagnosis: Medicine only recently had acquired the ability to detect these diseases and track the toll of outbreaks.

Heterotrimeric G proteins transduce information to intracellular partners by modulating GTP binding and hydrolysis3. Through their interaction with G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and effectors, G proteins provide the transducer function that is necessary for the conveyance of extracellular information4,5. Heterotrimeric G proteins consist of an α subunit bound to a β and γ subunit dimer; they remain a trimer while the α subunit is bound to GDP6.

On the basis of surveillance data on which strains were circulating, the WHO selected four that would become the foundation of that year's vaccine. One was an H3N2 virus strain that was the most prevalent of that particular subtype, at that moment. But by the time the vaccine was making its way into people's arms that autumn, a different version of the virus had taken over - and the vaccine was only 6% effective at protecting against it.

Placed on top of a pair of Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, MADIS converts the vehicles into a single short-ranged ground-based air defense system. The vehicles work together, with one focused on countering drones and the other geared toward helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. MADIS uses Stinger missiles and a 30mm cannon for those targets, and it also comes with radars and electronic warfare systems. Marines can also use MADIS while on the move, giving the service a mobile air defense option.

Last year, the James Webb Space Telescope made this observation of a dwarf irregular galaxy named I Zwicky 18, some 59 million light-years away from Earth. At the heart of the galaxy are two major star-forming regions surrounded by clouds of gas that have been sculpted by the stellar winds of the hot, young stars.

Lab mice are subjected to countless horrors during their short lives, from being injected with cancerous cells to getting exposed to microplastics or ending up dosed with cocaine. It's a controversial research standard that has long been criticized by animal rights activists. Even some in the scientific community argue they deserve better treatment, much like their human counterparts in clinical trials.

Thousands of years ago in what is now the Dominican Republic, there was a cave full of bones. And those bones were full of bees. In a paleontological first, researchers have discovered that bees used the jawbones of now extinct mammals as burrows. It's not clear what species of bee was exploiting this grisly opportunityonly their smooth-walled nests were left behind, nestled in the tooth pockets of ancient rodents and sloths.

The metabolic rate of an organism is the sum of the energy necessary to acquire, convert and allocate energy to growth, reproduction and maintenance, which sets energetic limits on biological activities and establishes the pace and pattern of life. The temperature- and mass-dependence of metabolic rate, from the smallest unicellular organisms to the largest plants and animals9, enables one to reconstruct the metabolic rates of extinct organisms and retrodict fundamental large-scale features of their palaeoenvironments11.

In the future, a caregiving machine might gently lift an elderly person out of bed in the morning and help them get dressed. A cleaning bot could trundle through a child's room, picking up scattered objects, depositing toys on shelves and tucking away dirty laundry. And in a factory, mechanical hands may assemble a next-generation smartphone from its first fragile component to the finishing touch.

Part of the motivation for conducting science is hope: the hope that what you're doing, research-wise, could end up revolutionizing how we conceptualize reality. Although we've come so far in understanding this Universe - including what its laws and constituents are at a fundamental level, and how those fundamental components assemble to create the varied and complex reality we inhabit today - we're certain that there's still more to learn, as many paradoxes about and several important puzzles remain unsolved.

The idea of having this medal, and Starmus being entrusted to organising it, is Jane's. Jane said she would like this to happen. And I think it's because of the very special relationship she had with us, he said. Goodall's grandson, Merlin van Lawick, welcomed the award. The Starmus Jane Goodall Earth medal will acknowledge sustainable programmes undertaken to make our world a better place for people, animals and the environment and provide encouragement for the continuation of that work, he said.

In what has become a common occurrence recently, the ground shook again in San Ramon on Tuesday, this time before sunrise. The magnitude 3.1 quake rattled the Tri-Valley at 5:53 a.m. and was centered about 3.1 miles southeast of San Ramon. There were no initial reports of damages or injuries. The quake came only eight days after three earthquakes shook the area in the course of about 100 minutes.

There are microbes living in medicine cabinets across the U.S., next to the aspirin and the Band-Aids. And people want them there. Indeed, consumers probably paid good money for them. Probiotics are capsules or pills with live microorganismsalmost always bacteria or yeastthat are supposed to confer health benefits once people swallow them. Some of my friends, including a woman who was recently treated for cancer and a man with persistent digestive issues, bought the pills at the recommendation of doctors.

Under no light but the stars, a green sea turtle hauls herself out of the surf and onto the familiar sand of Alagadi Beach on the northern coast of Cyprus. She doesn't notice any predators as she makes her way up the beach; tonight will be the night. When the turtle reaches a satisfactory spot, she nestles into the warm sand and begins excavating a deep pit. Nothing can distract her; she's gone into a kind of trance.

NASA, ESA, I. Pasha, P. van Dokkum Day 16 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: The Bullseye. This recent image of LEDA 1313424, nicknamed the Bullseye Galaxy, was made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

That hasn't dissuaded a growing number of Chinese companies from unabashedly ripping off the concept, as Ars Technica reports. Most recently, state-operated news outlet China.com detailed acompany called "Beijing Leading Rocket Technology" that named its latest vehicle concept Xingzhou-1 - which translates to "Starship-1" or "Starvessel-1." A render of the rocket closely resembles SpaceX's design as well, from the overall proportions down to the grid fins designed to guide the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft back down to the ground.

The brain's main task is to minimize the gap between expectation and reality. This gap is what the Free Energy Principle defines as free energy. When the brain encounters unpredictable input, its stress level rises. And it's crucial to understand: this isn't about you as a person or a "user", it's about your brain. It's not something we consciously control, but it's something we can use.

They focused on UPF1, a protein that acts like a proofreader, scanning RNA and destroying defective copies before they cause trouble. This process, called mRNA decay, is essential for healthy cells. The team discovered that UPF1 and TDP-43 normally work together to control the length of RNA messages - especially at their tail ends. These regions help regulate how long an RNA message lasts and where it goes in the cell. In ALS, these processes go haywire, leading to unstable RNA and stressed neurons.

In August 2025, I published my own attempt at characterizing affect, which I call the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025). The conceptualization is grounded in the contemporary neuroscience perspectives of Predictive Processing(Clark, 2023) and Active Inference (Parr, Pezzulo, & Friston, 2022). It also draws inspiration from Ecological Psychology (Gibson, 1979; Withagen, 2022) and my own clinical experiences. Below I provide a high-level overview of the AMF, with the intention to explore each of these areas in more detail across other posts.

High up in the Arctic Circle, Olivier Chastel begins his working day by scanning the horizon for polar bears, rifle at the ready. "In 25 years I've never had to use it, but you can't be too careful," he explains. There can't be many conservationists who go birdwatching while armed, but the danger to life from bears in Svalbard - the largest island of the Norwegian polar archipelago - is so high that it's a legal requirement.

What I asked them to do was simple; I said, "Draw a scientist." I didn't give them any other directions. I didn't make up this experiment-researchers have been asking children of various ages to "Draw a scientist" for more than five decades. They don't do this because they are interested in children's art; instead, they are interested in how children think about scientists and, more specifically, whether they think of them as male or female.

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You're listening to our weekly science news roundup. First up, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported last Monday that 2025 is shaping up to be the second-hottest year on record, with data suggesting it will tie with 2023 for runner-up status. To learn more about what this means, we are talking to Andrea Thompson, senior desk editor for life science here at Scientific American. Hi, Andrea.

NASA, ESA, STScI

Even the closest exoplanets are more than 4 light years away (36 trillion miles), which makes it doubtful that we'll ever visit one-so why bother? The reason is, it helps us answer an age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? As far as we understand, you need a planet to have life, and the race is on to locate one with Earth-like qualities.

They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium:

For decades, my colleagues and I advanced the premise that early substance use-nicotine, alcohol, or cannabis (or other addicting drugs)-interferes with critical maturation stages, particularly adolescence. Some questioned the science behind these premises, while others said it was propaganda from people disapproving of drugs like cannabis to justify their views. Despite this, clinicians often conveyed the cautionary: "The adolescent brain is still developing," or "Drugs hurt the teenage brain."