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Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
Dynomight asks why the liver regenerates so well while most human tissues heal poorly, surveying biology, evolution, and regenerative medicine.
20 min · 4,636 words
arXiv receives multiyear investment to support independent nonprofit launch
arXiv announces $17.2M in multiyear philanthropic commitments from the Simons Foundation International, XTX Markets, and the Siegel Family Endowment as it launches as an independent nonprofit.
4 min · 825 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Elise Cutts for Quanta Magazine explores how biological systems may not rely on quantum physics, yet often obey quantumlike mathematics—interference, contextuality, and what that means for modeling life.
11 min · 2,523 words
How Zambia Approved an HIV Drug in 12 Days
How Zambia’s medicines regulator authorized an HIV drug in 12 days—and what that says about the access gap when medicines sit where the disease is not.
16 min · 3,572 words
Rainmaker Raises $100M Series B to Scale Low-Cost Water Production and Weather Modification
Rainmaker Technology announced a $100 million Series B to expand atmospheric research and scale drone-based cloud seeding for freshwater production. The company says its radar and validation systems have linked operations to more than 145 million verified gallons of freshwater.
1 min · 263 words
Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago?
A PLOS ONE study examines stone points from Obi-Rakhmat Cave and asks whether they indicate early projectile / arrow technology around 80,000 years ago in Central Asia.
66 min · 15,269 words
Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
Researchers document a humpback whale appearing to grieve a stillborn calf, adding rare observational evidence to debates about cetacean emotion and maternal behavior.
2 min · 407 words
The Millennium Problems for Biology
A proposed set of millennium-scale open problems for biology—framed as hard, motivating challenges analogous to the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prize Problems.
7 min · 1,615 words
Do birds have accents? The fascinating regional differences in birdsong
Zoologist Louise Gentle explains how birdsong dialects vary by region—why accents form, how they spread, and what they reveal about learning and culture in birds.
4 min · 910 words
Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy as you age
Linguist Karen Stollznow surveys evidence that bilingualism and later-life language learning support cognitive reserve, even though adult acquisition looks different from childhood learning.
4 min · 976 words
Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
Stanford Medicine–led research finds the human brain is two distinct organs—the cerebrum and the brainstem—opening new avenues for studying diseases that selectively affect the brainstem.
5 min · 1,248 words
Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
Jason Bittel reports on a small spotted tiger cat from Bolivia—identified through sanctuary work and genetics—that may signal a broader wave of newly recognized small-cat species.
7 min · 1,553 words
How strong is the strong interaction?
In CERN Courier, Harvey Meyer recounts the decades of lattice QCD work behind the recent determination of the strong coupling constant to five parts per mille using only low-energy hadron inputs, and explains why the result is a clean test of the Standard Model against collider measurements.
10 min · 2,375 words
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.Comb jellies illuminate early nervous systems and bioluminescence
Marlowe Starling reports how comb jellies (ctenophores) help biologists probe the earliest animal nervous systems, membrane chemistry, and bioluminescence—organisms as distant from us as we are from jellyfish.
2 min · 465 words
Celebrating 70 years of Fortran
Joe Wallwork marks seventy years since Fortran's 1957 debut: why the language still thrives in scientific computing, what the Fortran-lang community is building, and how modern Fortran fits high-performance and climate work.
2 min · 374 words
The Economics of Scientific Publishing
NYU Stern’s Vishal Singh maps scholarly publishing economics across 13 years and 4.2M articles a year: unpaid manuscripts and peer review, margins above Apple’s, and why third-party intermediaries prove so hard to dislodge.
16 min · 3,775 words
Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope's Little Red Dots
Charlie Wood explains the debate over James Webb's mysterious little red dots: whether they are standard supermassive black holes or black hole stars—colossal hydrogen shells powered by hidden black holes—and what that would mean for how the first big black holes formed.
12 min · 2,798 words
Vincent Zaballa's interactive notes on simulation-based optimal experimental design and active learning, using a biology-inspired framing to introduce information bridging for readers new to the area.
9 min · 2,161 words