For nearly 100 years, the United States has been the world's leader in a wide variety of scientific fields. No other country has: invested as much in fundamental scientific research, has made more scientific breakthroughs and scientific advances, has attracted more scientific researchers to move there to conduct their research, or has conducted more projects and been home to more scientists that have won Nobel Prizes.
Planet Labs ( ) has been on a tear, soaring 388% in 2025 and up another 96% since reporting earnings one month ago. The stock is up an incredible 811% from its 52-week low of $2.79 per share. While it has been winning significant government contracts, such as yesterday's announcement that it won a nine-figure contract from the Swedish government, which drove the stock 12% higher, PL is unprofitable and likely won't be for some time.
Structural biology is essential for understanding diseases and for developing drugs and vaccines. Africa has few specialists in this field, owing to limited infrastructure, training and mentorship opportunities - despite the efforts of non-profit organizations such as BioStruct-Africa, which I co-founded. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00072-3Competing Interests E.N. received a 2024 Google Award for a socially impactful project enabled by AlphaFold and Google DeepMind sponsorship in 2025 to support the BioStruct-Africa structural-biology training event (series 6). E.N. is also supported by a Wellcome Trust award (grant number 222999/Z/21/Z).
Batteries in electric vehicles that regularly use 100-plus-kilowatts fast chargers degrade faster than those that rely primarily on slow charging, a new study suggests. Using fast chargers more frequently can cause some packs to lose nearly a quarter of their capacity in eight years, it claims. We've seen other studies suggest that fast charging has little impact on long-term battery health, so it's not a settled debate.
Scientists at Tufts have found a way to turn common glucose into a rare sugar that tastes almost exactly like table sugar-but with far fewer downsides. Using engineered bacteria as microscopic factories, the team can now produce tagatose efficiently and cheaply, achieving yields far higher than current methods. Tagatose delivers nearly the same sweetness as sugar with significantly fewer calories, minimal impact on blood sugar, and even potential benefits for oral and gut health.
The study's authors researched 96 peer-reviewed studies documenting SSB to compile one of the most comprehensive datasets for primates to date. The study found that SSB are a "persistent and integral component of primate social [practices]." In fact, the prevalence of SSB across a variety of closely related primate species - and over several lines of descendants - "indicates a deep evolutionary root or multiple independent evolutionary origins," the study's authors wrote.
The online encyclopedia now holds more than seven million articles and has become a standard guide for anyone seeking information. The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization in San Francisco, California, runs the project with about 700 employees, but Wikipedia still relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to write and edit its articles: hundreds of thousands of people contribute to the site each month, under a set of community-developed rules to deal with disagreements, cut down self-promotion and generate consensus.
In the U.S., more than 8 percent of all visits to a health care provider in the week that ended December 27 were for respiratory illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's the highest rate the agency has recorded since it began keeping track in 1997. According to the CDC, so far this season the flu has contributed to an estimated 120,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, including nine children.
A dead star 730 light years away appears to be forming a powerful structure around itself - and despite their best efforts, astronomers aren't sure how. The cosmic corpse, designated RXJ0528+2838, is an incredibly dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, with a Sun-like star orbiting around it. This binary arrangement isn't uncommon throughout the universe, but what is strange is the structure surrounding the former body: a highly energetic and luminescent cloud known as a nebula,
Funes could learn languages and recite books from memory. Recalling a single day took him an entire day, as every detail accumulated itself in his mind in its most meticulous insignificance. The poor wretch saw this as a gift, but as his story unfolds, it reveals itself more as a curse, for remembering in such detail prevented him from distinguishing the essential from the superfluous.
We don't merely have the Hubble tension to reckon with, or the fact that different methods yield different values for the expansion rate of the Universe today, but a puzzle over whether dark energy is truly a constant in our Universe, as most physicists have assumed since its discovery back in 1998. While "early relic" methods using CMB or baryon acoustic oscillation data favor a lower value of around 67 km/s/Mpc, "distance ladder" methods instead prefer a higher, incompatible value of around 73 km/s/Mpc.
Shakespeare wrote in his play As You Like It that we humans go through seven ages. The first is the "infant mewling and puking"; next "the whining schoolboy"; then "the lover sighing like a furnace", followed by the soldier "full of strange oaths, seeking the bubble reputation"; then "the justice in fair round belly"; the sixth age is "with spectacles on nose"; and finally there's "second childishness".
Your stargazing experience can differ greatly based on where you are in the world. That's due in part to light pollution, which can drown out all but the brightest stars and satellites in densely populated areas. For truly unforgettable celestial views, you'll need to visit one of the darkest places in the U.S. on a clear night. DarkSky is an Arizona-based nonprofit with the mission "to restore the nighttime environment and protect communities and wildlife from light pollution."
This spectacular book of photographs of the Universe is dedicated to the late astronomer and broadcaster Patrick Moore, who introduced the authors to one another. Astrophysicist Derek Ward-Thompson, rock guitarist Brian May - who also holds a PhD in astrophysics - and astrophotographer J.-P. Metsävainio showcase some of the "billions of vast glowing islands in the immensity of what seems like infinite space and time". Several of the photos appear in adjacent pairs, visible in 3D with a stereo-focusing viewer.
For many of us humans, old trees - gnarled oaks or towering redwoods - are sources of psychological comfort. As elders who have weathered earlier times of crisis, they signify continuity and resilience. Their rings bridge present and past and remind us that our "now" is only one of many. But for longer-distance time travel, we must seek out even more ancient ancestors. The ones with the longest memories, full of insights germane to our Anthropocene anxieties, are right here in our midst:
You may have a leg up on the child prodigies who made you feel inadequate as a school kid. Despite outliers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a new analysis based on 19 studies involving 34,000 high achievers across multiple disciplines - including Nobel laureates, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians - found that individuals who achieved peak performance early in life were not always the same people to reach high success in adulthood.
I think the first thing to remember is: We are right at the beginning of this adventure. There's so much excitement that every little signal - every "wiggle" in a spectrum - gets people saying, "Oh! That might be life!" And then, on the other side, other people respond with, "I don't see enough wiggles, so there's probably not even an atmosphere. Dead planet. Move on." Both reactions are too fast.
Earthquakes usually strike without warning. But sometimes they come in clusters dozens or even hundreds of small quakes concentrated in one area over days or weeks. Geologists call these clusters earthquake swarms, and while they can be unsettling, scientists say they rarely signal that a major quake is imminent. Unlike the familiar pattern of a single large earthquake followed by aftershocks, swarms consist of many small quakes without a clear mainshock.
A global research team has analyzed the prospects for biomineralization on Mars, a process in which bacteria, fungi, and microalgae can create minerals as part of their metabolism, offering a byproduct that could be useful to prospective Martian explorers by providing the raw materials needed to produce aggregates such as concrete. With an extremely thin and mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, air pressure less than 1 percent of Earth's,
Greenland sharks are a biological anomaly. The animals can grow to more than 20 feet long, weigh more than a ton and can live for nearly 400 years, making the species the longest-living vertebrate on the planeta fact that could help unlock secrets to enhancing longevity. And now, in a study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists dial in to one of the Greenland shark's more remarkable features: it has functioning eyes and, more remarkably, maintains its vision well into senescence.
Poisoned arrows or darts have long been used by cultures all over the world for hunting or warfare. For example, there are recipes for poisoning projective weapons, and deploying them in battle, in Greek and Roman historical documents, as well as references in Greek mythology and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Chinese warriors over the ages did the same, as did the Gauls and Scythians, and some Native American populations.
On Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth. The robot spotted it in 2024 along the banks of a Martian riverbed and zapped it with an ultraviolet laser. It contained ancient layers of mud, compressed into shale in the 3.5 billion years since the river last coursed across the red planet.
