Quantum computing, biotech, fusion energy, and the scientific discoveries transforming our world.
106 articles
An international team published Orbformer in Nature on August 21, an ab initio foundation model pretrained on 22,000 molecular structures that matches classical multireference methods on bond dissociation and Diels–Alder benchmarks. The work is the first practical demonstration of amortizing the Schrödinger equation across many molecules.
Merck and Moderna said on August 20 that intismeran autogene, a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, met its primary endpoint in a 1,137-patient Phase 3 trial in high-risk melanoma. The result is the first late-stage clinical validation of personalized mRNA oncology and clears the path for regulatory filings in Q4.
Merck and Moderna on August 19 announced the first positive Phase 3 readout for a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine — mRNA-4157 combined with Keytruda — in high-risk resected melanoma. The combination reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 44 percent versus Keytruda alone, with a hazard ratio of 0.56 over a median 34-month follow-up.
A team led by Swinburne University's Dr. Marcus Lower reports in Nature on August 18 what may be the first detection of vacuum birefringence — light refracted by 'virtual particles' in apparently empty space — using NASA's IXPE X-ray telescope and CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope on magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408. The observation tracks polarization signatures consistent with a 90-year-old quantum electrodynamics prediction.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released its sharpest image of the Lion Nebula on August 16, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope confirmed its August 30 launch window, and a Nature paper published August 15 described the first glass-box dynamical-deep-learning model to deliver skillful ENSO seasonal forecasts.
NASA engineers performed a delicate power-shedding sequence on Voyager 2 in early August 2026 — nicknamed the 'Big Bang' — that will keep its three remaining science instruments operating for at least another year on the 49-year-old probe, now 16.31 billion miles from Earth.
Data from India's Aditya-L1 solar observatory shows snapping and reconnecting magnetic field lines supply about 93 percent of the energy that keeps the corona at millions of degrees, BBC News reported August 14.
Astronomers using the partially completed MOTHRA telescope in Chile have captured 22 bow shocks in the outer Helix Nebula, witnessing for the first time how dying stars return star-forged elements to interstellar space, Nature reported.
A Hubble deep-field image of the ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC 9050-Dw1 reveals 'Oyashio' — a tidal stream of stripped stars that yields the first stream-based dark matter halo constraint for such a galaxy, Nature reports.
Astronomers reported in Nature on August 12 a new class of astrophysical object found by the James Webb Space Telescope — a 'black hole star' the size of our solar system producing about 100 billion times more energy than the Sun.
Researchers at BESIII presented evidence at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Natal, Brazil, that the X(2370) particle first seen in 2011 is mostly made of gluons — direct proof that gluons can bind themselves, as quantum chromodynamics predicts.
Physicists from the ALICE collaboration report the first multidimensional measurement of incoherent J/psi photonuclear production, the sharpest look yet at whether gluons inside nuclei behave as expected or saturate into an extreme state.
NASA's transit-hunting telescope spotted a planet 1.63 times Jupiter's size orbiting an orange dwarf 20 percent smaller than the Sun — a discovery method it was never designed for, researchers reported Tuesday.
An unreleased research version of Claude raised the proven lower bound on the proportion of Riemann zeta zeros satisfying the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%, Anthropic announced on August 10 — the latest sign of AI models' progress in mathematics, with two outside experts reviewing the result.
A giant skull left to the elements on Bjornoya nearly 80 years ago has been identified as Arctobatrachus urdensis, a 2.7-meter amphibian-like hunter and the largest plagiosaurid ever found.
The Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium reconstructed the complete genome of donor HG002, adding more than 900 million DNA letters and revealing 15% more of the genome, in a 12-paper package published August 6 in Cell.
Arizona State University researchers analyzed nearly 69,000 insect species and found haplodiploidy alone does not predict eusociality, challenging a hypothesis that has anchored evolutionary biology for more than 60 years.
The first total solar eclipse over European land in 20 years arrives August 12, with the path of totality crossing Greenland, Iceland and Spain — and skywatchers and scientists planning campaigns along the route.
Researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute used the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2 to design complete viral genomes that produced self-replicating viruses inside E. coli, results published in Science on August 6.
The NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest-resolution images of the Sun's surface ever taken, revealing ubiquitous Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices that drive plasma mixing — and may help explain why the corona is so hot.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania built a chewing gum from lablab beans that sharply reduced HPV and two cancer-linked bacteria in oral samples — a potential low-cost adjunct to head and neck cancer treatment.