Studies, labs, the scientific method
Researchers found that a beam's underlying geometric structure guides how chirality — left- and right-handed rotational behaviour — emerges as light travels. The discovery could open uses in medical diagnostics, communications and quantum technologies.
Scientists directly measured autophagy in human blood, skin and nerve cells — and found more activity, not less, was linked to worse fitness in people aged 70 and over. The finding challenges a long-held assumption that declining cellular recycling is a hallmark of ageing.
The Rhine, Danube, Po, Loire, Rhône and Seine all reached record lows at the same time, forcing nuclear plant shutdowns and halting cargo transport. Copernicus called it the worst summer for river flows since its records began in 1992.
Average scores in reading, mathematics and science across OECD countries have hit their lowest point since 2015. Covid, screen time and weaker teaching of core skills are among the explanations, though the report does not weigh their relative effect.
France wants to farm 20,000 tonnes of salmon by 2030. A five-year investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project found that the fishmeal feeding those fish has left a trail of pollution, worker deaths and protests across 64 countries.
Two teams independently built the first working thorium-229 nuclear clocks, shifting timekeeping from electron transitions to the atom's nucleus. Nature published both designs on the same day — and the Beijing prototype came out ahead.
A study found pollution rose sharply across 46 cities once the State Department shut its embassy monitoring network in March 2025. The biggest increases were in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where embassy readings were often the only credible source of data available.
The EU's Horizon Europe research arm wants to build a framework that can identify and attribute unauthorised attempts to alter the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight back into space. The move comes as private companies and governments step up work on solar geoengineering, with few international rules in place to govern it.
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.
Now downgraded to Category 4, the storm is not expected to hit Mexico's Pacific coast directly. But heavy rain is forecast for Guerrero state, where roads are already damaged and flooding and mudslides remain a serious risk.
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.
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.
A major study finds that AI has sped up literature review, coding and hypothesis generation, but physical experiments, approvals and senior researchers' time haven't kept pace. Four in ten scientists say their backlog of untested ideas is growing.
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.
The rate has dropped from five births per woman in 1950 to 2.25 today, and is projected to cross the 2.1 replacement threshold by the late 2040s, possibly sooner. Much of the world is already well below it — South Korea's rate stands at 0.7, and Chile's fell below one birth per woman for the first time in 2025.
Below-normal flows covered more than a third of global river basins in 2025 — the seventh consecutive year in which normal conditions were a minority. Glaciers lost 408 gigatonnes, groundwater levels are outside historical norms in most monitored wells, and Asia and Africa have borne more than 80% of water-related deaths over the past five years.
A five-year EU research project sampled 227 fields in 11 countries and found plastic particles in all of them. Researchers say the particles can carry pesticides, toxins and bacteria through the soil — and that smaller particles may be able to cross biological membranes and reach internal organs.
The longest satellite record of polar ice ever assembled finds the rate of loss in the 2010s was four times higher than in the 1980s. The combined melt has already added over three centimetres to global sea levels, enough to put up to nine million people at greater risk of coastal flooding.
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 UNEP report says global temperatures will exceed the Paris Agreement limit before the end of the decade. It urges governments to manage an "overshoot, peak, and decline" pathway — cutting emissions rapidly while removing carbon already in the atmosphere.
Unintended emissions from satellite electronics — not their communications transmitters — are corrupting telescope data at observatories in Australia, South Africa, Botswana and the United States. Existing international rules cover only deliberate transmissions, leaving astronomers with no clear path to relief.
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.
The project began in 2008 and was once dismissed as unfeasible. The finished map records 166,700 neurons and roughly 125 million synapses, making it the largest single-animal nervous-system map ever assembled.
Researchers ruled out military and power-station origins, but the precise location of the release has not been confirmed. The episode has renewed questions about whether international systems for detecting and disclosing radiological events are fit for purpose.
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