After proving this concept across multiple studies, the team developed therapeutic cancer vaccines to tackle one of the most challenging targets yet - HPV-driven tumors. In a new study published in Science Advances, the scientists discovered that systematically changing the orientation and placement of a single cancer-targeting peptide can lead to formulations that supercharge the immune system's ability to attack tumors.
The barriers to reading, writing, and editing DNA are falling fast. A scientist can now order synthetic gene sequences from manufacturers and have them within days - soon, it could be common to produce them right in the lab using a benchtop DNA synthesizer. High school students are learning CRISPR gene-editing techniques. Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms trained on biological data are accelerating experimentation and generating sequences that don't exist in nature.
There's a feeling I love almost more than anything: the feeling of sinking into a good book while the world around me fades away. My breathing slows, my shoulders drop, and the mental chatter in the back of my mind goes quiet. What's happening in those moments goes far deeper than entertainment or education, and we seem to sense this instinctively.
When horse racing fans rhapsodize about Secretariat's enormous heart, they're not speaking metaphorically - a postmortem exam in 1989 found that it weighed between 21 and 22 pounds, two-and-a-half times more than the average thoroughbred's heart. The legendary horse also had a perfectly proportioned bone structure, flawless biomechanics, and a seemingly innate hunger for the finish line.
Preliminary dating, based on the presence of fossilized algae that only existed during specific geological periods, suggests that the core represents an archive of the past 23 million years. This includes periods when Earth's average surface temperature was hotter than today's - and higher than the temperature projected for 2100 under current global climate policies. The core was retrieved as part of the Sensitivity of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to 2 °C (SWAIS2C) project.
Fossils are remarkable for their ability to viscerally connect us with long-lost life. The bulk of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull, the biting point of a shark tooth, the startling familiarity of a hominin footprintand then there's the charm inherent to any sample of regurgitalite, the paleontological term for fossilized vomit. Okay, charm might be a stretch, but to the right scientist, the rare finds are little treasures, says Arnaud Rebillard, a Ph.D. candidate in paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Berlin.
A long history of studies in human genetics has investigated how the powerful evolutionary pressure of endemic malaria has resulted in the selection of genetic variants that moderate the effect of the disease. In 1948, J. B. S. Haldane first suggested that heterozygous carriers of alleles that confer β-thalassaemia, a life-threatening anaemia at that time, could reduce mortality during malaria infection, and this 'heterozygote advantage' might explain the increased frequency
'To get it to flip, linear force isn't enough,' one of their researchers said. 'We need a pivot point. 'For the pancake to flip, it must rotate. This comes from torque, which happens when the pan pushing slightly off the pancake's centre of mass, giving it angular acceleration.'
Calling nanoscientists: your field needs you to try to replicate a landmark finding that quantum dots can act as biosensors inside living cells. As part of the first large-scale effort in the physical sciences to tackle the reproducibility crisis, researchers in France and the Netherlands are offering funds and resources in exchange for a few months of work. "We are trying to use
Neuroscientist Karen Konkoly is a lucid dreamer. When she's asleep and immersed in a dream, she knows that she is, in fact, dreaming. One of her favorite things to do during these sleep sojourns is pose personal, even existential questions - probing the mysterious terrain of her own subconscious mind. Asa researcher who studies the human mind, Konkoly has read many scientific papers positing different explanations for why humans dream - and she's made it her mission to rigorously test them.
The vast gravity hole, known as the Antarctic Geoid Low (AGL), is the product of incredibly slow rock movements, according to the experts. Starting 70 million years ago - a time while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth - less-dense rock built up beneath the frozen continent and weakened the pull of gravity. The gravity hole started small before rapidly growing in strength between 50 and 30 million years ago - creating the strange ocean dip that we see today.
Countless millions of nonhuman animals (animals) of all sorts are used in a diverse array of laboratory research. Their treatment varies from being unspeakably inhumanely abused to being treated with kindness, depending on the questions at hand and the values and attitudes of the researchers themselves. The lives of these animals truly are hidden, and most people are incredulous when they learn that laboratory rats and mice still are not considered "animals" under the current federal Animal Welfare Act.
Practical physics classes were competing with the allure of sports in the 1800s, and top tips for the best-smelling garden, in this week's peek at the Nature archives. 100 years ago doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00297-2 This article features text from Nature's archive. By its historical nature, the archive includes some images, articles and language that by twenty-first-century standards are offensive and harmful. Find out more.
Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain's connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders - and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers.
At first glance, it looked like Wooller and his colleagues might have found evidence that mammoths lived in central Alaska just 2,000 years ago. But ancient DNA revealed that two "mammoth" bones actually belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale-which raised a whole new set of questions. The team's hunt for Alaska's last mammoth had turned into an epic case of mistaken identity, starring two whale species and a mid-century fossil hunter.
In all the known Universe, at least as of 2026, the only world known to support life is planet Earth. Despite all we've learned about the Universe, including: the vast abundance of exoplanets, including rocky exoplanets with Earth-like temperatures, the ubiquity of heavy elements, the commonness of organic molecules that are known precursors to life, and the long cosmic timescales over which stars with such planets form, there are no known examples of worlds, other than our own, where life processes or definitive biosignatures have been detected.
Any object or concept can be represented as a form, a topological surface, and consequently any process can be regarded as a transition from one form to another. If the transition is smooth and continuous, there are well-established mathematical methods for describing it. In nature, however, the evolution of forms usually involves abrupt changes and perplexing divergences, or transformations. Because these transformations represent sudden disruptions of otherwise continuous processes, Rene Thom of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France termed them elementary catastrophes.
The Science Museum is boldly going where no science museum has (probably) gone before, opening a season of Star Trek events that beam sci-fi imagination straight into the realm of real science. To mark Star Trek's 60th anniversary, the Science Museum will launch several months of events with a late-evening opening of the museum for adults next month. The museum late takes place on Thursday 26th March, and will feature a range of Star Trek themed events throughout the evening.
On a spring day in 1694, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - the father of microbiology - used a magnifying lens to look at a candle through the dissected eye of a dragonfly. But instead of seeing 1 candle flame, he saw hundreds of tiny flames, repeated over and over. But spoiler alert - this is not how insects see. Hi, I'm Niba, and today we're going to explore how insects really see the world.
But on days when more staff are required to be in, office spaces can feel noticeably busier and noisier. Despite so much focus on getting workers back into offices, there has been far less focus on the impacts of returning to open-plan workspaces. Now, more research confirms what many suspected: our brains have to work harder in open-plan spaces than in private offices.
In Extended Data Fig. 8 of this article, a micrograph shown in the left column (panel AZD) was inadvertently duplicated during figure preparation. The intended image was meant to show phospho-ERK (P-ERK) levels in a MAP2K1-mutant patient-derived xenograft (PDX) exposed to the MEK inhibitor AZD6244 (AZD). However, this image was accidentally overlaid with a micrograph from Extended Data Fig. 10 (left column, panel PAN), which displays P-ERK levels in an EGFR-mutant PDX exposed to panitumumab (PAN).
The first time that University of Oxford astronomer Lyla Jung saw the cosmic configuration on her monitor, she almost didn't believe it was real. But it wasand Jung and her colleagues went on to identify one of the largest rotating structures ever found in space: a chain of galaxies embedded in a spinning cosmic filament 400 million light-years from Earth. The finding, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may give astronomers new insights into galaxies' formation, evolution and diversity, Jung says.
The AMNH has one of the biggest dinosaur halls and exhibits-and they're iconic for a reason! The nearly complete Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed Apex (one of the most complete ever discovered) has been on display and continues to draw crowds with its massive plates and spikes.
They are very territorial, so while it's a little early for breeding season, your little tapper could have already staked out his territory and is determined to protect it, even if he is protecting it from himself. Few creatures understand that the birds they are seeing in windows and other reflective surfaces are actually just their own reflection. So they do what's natural and peck at the intruder to scare them away.
