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The Murchison meteorite has been sitting in collections since 1969, when it broke apart over the Australian state of Victoria and scattered in pieces across paddocks and roadsides. Researchers have picked at it for decades. It is one of the most studied rocks not from this planet, stuffed with organic molecules, and a standing puzzle: which of those molecules came from space, and which it picked …

For 59 days before the encounter, the asteroid would not hold still. Lucy’s long-range camera kept watching this faint smudge of reflected light from millions of kilometres out, and the brightness rose and fell the way it should for a rotating lump of rock, except the pattern never quite repeated. One period of about 253 hours, fine. But buried underneath sat a second rhythm, roughly 455 hours, t…

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Six months in, the capsules were clearly working. Spinal fluid drawn from older adults swallowing two grams of DHA a day showed the omega-3 piling up exactly where it was meant to go: inside the brain, ferried across from the bloodstream, lifting concentrations by roughly 17 per c New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

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Put on a virtual reality headset, watch a stranger’s cheek being stroked while a researcher strokes your own in perfect New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

Korean Database Rebuild Aims to Cure AI’s Habit of Making Things Up Research team photo. From left: Jeongho Park, engineer at GraphAI and second author; Donghyoung Han, CTO of GraphAI and third author; Geonho Lee, Ph.D. student in the KAIST School of Computing and first author; and Professor Min-Soo Kim of the KAIST School of Computing, corresponding author.

For more than a decade, one of the strangest worlds in our cosmic neighborhood kept slipping out of reach. Astronomers had a picture of it, a faint rosy speck beside a sun-like star New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. For more than a decade, one of the strangest worlds in our cosmic neighborhood kept slipping out of reach. Astronom…

Most Probiotics Aren’t Chosen for What They Actually Do, a Sweeping Pharmacy Survey Finds University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers led by Jason Papin, PhD, analyzed more than 350 over-the-counter probiotics sold at the three largest pharmacy chains in the United States.

A Ghost Particle from Cosmic Noon Points to a Hidden Class of Neutrino Factory Left: the field around the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed “Shadow Blaster.” This galaxy lies 11 billion light-years away and sits just behind the bright red galaxy at the center of this image. Center: a close-up of the gravitational lens in which the red foreground gal

Start with a number that ought to give the whole boom pause: within a year of starting one of the new weight-loss injections, roughly two-thirds of people taking them for obesity alone have stopped. Sixty-five percent, give New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

A mouse finds the bait before you do. It is curious by nature, drawn to anything new in its territory, so the little block of poison tucked behind the refrigerator is less a threat than an invitation. It nibbles. In a city street a few doors down, a rat does the calculus differently. It circles the same bait for days, sniffs, retreats, comes back, sniffs again. That difference in temperament, it …

On a PET scan, amyloid shows up as a wash of colour across the cortex, brighter where the sticky protein has gathered into plaques. For decades the reading of those scans has rested on a tidy assumption: carry the APOE ε4 gene variant, the strongest common genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s, and your brain is far more likely to light up. More amyloid, more risk New! Sign up for our em…

The gap was eight millimetres. The cockroach was taller than that, and it knew it, in whatever way a cockroach knows things. It lowered its head, swept its antennae across the underside of the shutter blocking the corridor, and shoved. The shutter lifted. The insect was through in a little under ten seconds, the same as any of its untouched cage-mates. The difference was that this one had a radio…

Pull a tuft of it apart and it looks like cotton wool, all airy white fibres that spring back when you squeeze them. Roll it into a ball, flatten it into a sheet, bend it round your finger, it doesn’t much care. But hold it under a dripping tap a New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

The deli counter wins, every time. Put a tray of meat sliced by a person in a grocery store next to a vacuum-sealed packet off a factory line, and shoppers reach for the human version. They rate it tastier. Fresher. Somehow more hon New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.