Felix Andersen covers science with an eye for how things evolve and why progress happens. Data-driven, cautiously optimistic, and drawn to the counterintuitive result.
Curved arcs of light around XLSSC 122, some 10.4 billion light-years away, confirm strong gravitational lensing for the first time. The cluster's dense core is hard to square with models predicting slower growth at that stage of cosmic history.
The agency has issued a 360-page request for proposals, its third change of approach this year. It plans to select at least two contractors, with a final decision intended for April.
Decades of farming for yield have stripped staple foods of key minerals and vitamins. More than 2 billion people now have micronutrient deficiencies despite eating enough calories — a condition researchers call hidden hunger.
Rare charged oxygen and carbon particles inside the structure carried a 'smoking gun' fingerprint of their origin. The find adds to efforts to understand space weather that can disrupt GPS, satellite communications and electrical grids.
The treatment uses a single eye injection to make surviving retinal cells respond to amber light, paired with goggles that translate visual scenes into pulses. Six of ten patients hit the threshold for a clinically meaningful improvement.
Google DeepMind, Meta and federal science agencies are among the partners. The goal is an AI model that can predict how any cell behaves — but first the project needs to scale its datasets from hundreds of millions of cells to billions.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel share the 2026 prize for their work on optogenetics. The technique lets researchers target individual neurons in a living brain with precision that was once impossible.
The EU's Copernicus Climate Service says it was Europe's third-warmest summer on record — and the hottest ever for Western Europe. Half the continent felt temperatures above 38°C, while rivers ran at their lowest average flows since measurements began in 1992.
Seas averaged 21.6°C between June and August, the highest in 45 years of data. Along the Asturias coast, around 95% of kelp stands have disappeared since 2010 — and lobster, crayfish and sea urchins have gone with them.
Female infants devoted about 58.5% of their viewing time to a woman's face, compared with 51.2% for males. Boys showed no clear preference between the face and a swinging Newton's cradle.
A new paper argues that campfires extended evening social time by about four hours and created conditions poorly suited to gesture. Spoken storytelling, the authors suggest, filled the gap — and may have driven the development of complex language.
A University of Chicago study projects extreme heat from this year's super El Niño could kill 451,000 people worldwide between June 2026 and February 2027. Africa's Sahel and Southeast Asia face the heaviest toll, with Nigeria alone projected to lose 31,400 lives.
The new measurement of the gravitational constant differs from a leading 2007 result by 7.3 standard deviations — far beyond what the uncertainties of either experiment would predict. Researchers say they cannot yet tell whether the gap reflects a hidden flaw in one of the measurements or something not yet understood about gravity itself.
Workers at an Austrian gravel plant dredged up 540 fragments representing at least 500 uniform double-pointed bars, enough iron to forge 500 swords. Researchers believe a commercial vessel sank while carrying the cargo downstream some 2,000 years ago.
One system, trained on 40,000 four-dimensional cell films, grouped drugs by mechanism of action with 75% accuracy — nearly 20 points better than flat 2D images. A separate physics-based digital twin models what is physically happening inside the cell. The teams plan to combine them into a single workflow.
Front and back develop from entirely distinct cell populations that never overlap — a pattern preserved across species for at least 550 million years. The discovery has already allowed scientists to grow functional hindbrain motor neurons in the lab for the first time, opening a new path for research into ALS and other brainstem diseases.
The result, just shy of the threshold physicists require to claim a discovery, is the first entanglement measurement involving qutrits — particles with three possible spin states rather than two. Researchers reconstructed the finding from the electrons and muons released when the short-lived Z bosons decayed.
The World Meteorological Organization says 2025 was one of the driest years for river flows in 35 years. Glaciers and groundwater, which once cushioned communities through bad years, have been shrinking for a decade.
The IAEA now sees global nuclear generating capacity tripling to 1,284 GWe by 2060, with smaller modular reactors accounting for more than a quarter of new build. Nuclear's share of electricity generation actually slipped last year, from 8.7% to 8.4%, as overall power demand grew faster.
Elias 2-24 b is still embedded in the gas and dust around its host star, actively gathering material. The discovery challenges models that say a Jupiter-sized planet takes at least 5 million years to form.
McGetchin crater on the Moon is 728 feet wide and formed in spring 2024, when an asteroid or comet the size of a small building struck the surface. Events on this scale are estimated to occur only once every 132 years.
Researchers tracked 1,399 earthquakes at the Punggye-ri test site between 2008 and 2025, with magnitudes rising from around 1.0 to above 3.0 in recent years. The growing seismic signal, they warn, could make it harder to tell future nuclear explosions apart from natural earthquakes.
The tilcayo is a small spotted cat from Bolivia's Yungas cloud forests. The discovery was made after genetic testing of a single animal living at a rescue sanctuary.
A rapid analysis by the World Weather Attribution service says warming-related changes to ice and frozen ground set off a chain of failures on Langtang-Lirung mountain. Rivers in Nepal and Tibet rose up to nine metres in 30 minutes, and thousands remain missing.
The loss has added 3.14 centimetres to global sea levels, with annual rates far higher in the 2010s than in the 1980s. A brief slowdown from 2020 to 2023 reflects unusual snowfall and milder summers, not a reversal of the trend, the authors say.
Human organoids replaced nearly half the brain volume of genetically engineered mice, which then outperformed untreated animals in memory tasks. The Stanford team says the approach could transform how therapies for epilepsy, autism and cerebral palsy are tested.
A new report warns that water from the Himalayas supports around 20% of India's economy — and the glaciers feeding it are disappearing faster than ever. India has already flagged 56 glacial lakes as very high risk, while only 21 of the region's 40,000 glaciers are being closely monitored.
Global temperatures hit 16.96°C, or 1.65°C above pre-industrial levels, driven by human-caused climate change and a strengthening El Niño. Scientists warn the worst is still ahead: El Niño's biggest effect on global temperatures is expected over the coming year.
Reading fell by the equivalent of one and a half years of learning between 2015 and 2025; maths dropped by just over a year. One in five 15-year-olds is now classed as a low performer in all three core subjects, up from 16% in 2022.
AlphaGenome Atlas pre-calculates the predicted molecular impact of every possible genetic mutation, including the poorly understood 98% of the genome that doesn't code for proteins. The database is free for non-commercial research and 30 times the size of the AlphaFold Database, though it is not approved for clinical use.
Extreme fire-smoke events have tripled globally since the 1990s and may have contributed to nearly 100,000 extra deaths a year. The WMO says current risk models could be underestimating wildfire's toll on health by as much as 93 percent.
A chunk of glacier more than a kilometre wide broke away near Langtang Lirung peak, sending rivers nine metres higher within half an hour. Scientists say the Himalayas are warming twice as fast as the global average, and catastrophic floods there are becoming more frequent.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy on Sunday, beginning a five-year mission. It will probe dark energy and dark matter, survey planetary systems across the galaxy, and test equipment that could one day detect worlds like our own.
A study using ancient coral from the Galápagos Islands found that modern El Niño events are roughly 37% stronger than in the preindustrial era. The sharpest rise has come in the last 40 years, and researchers say natural variation alone cannot explain it.
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