This 2026 paper by Y. Yan et al., published in Advanced Photonics, presents an artificial synapse that operates entirely with light, requiring no electrical signals at any stage.
Fire salamanders—one of Europe’s most well-researched amphibians—are biofluorescent, which means they can absorb light from an external source at one wavelength, then re-emit it at another
A team of researchers at Cambridge (JRV Crump, M Gadioux, HS Reall, JE Santos) has demonstrated numerically that the third law of black hole mechanics can be violated in pure vacuum gravity, without any matter fields present.
Physicist Stephen Volz had been working with colleagues at the U.S.’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for nearly 10 years to produce a new generation of geostationary satellites — instruments that would provide critical observations about atmospheric conditions, climate patterns and weather. But when Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, this long-term project was thrown into disarray.
Even if agencies suddenly accelerated the flow of research dollars – as they did last year toward the end of the fiscal year – much of the damage from the slow rate of grantmaking is already done. Universities have already delayed or canceled projects, scaled back hiring or let researchers go, and admitted fewer graduate students – decisions they can’t easily reverse with a later influx of funds.
The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate
In a small stretch of the Atlantic Forest in southern Brazil lives a bright-orange species of frog that’s new to science, researchers report in a recent study. The miniature amphibian measures just over a centimeter long, less than half an inch, or the length of an average fingernail.
OpenAI announced on May 20 that one of its AI models disproved a conjecture posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946, solving what’s known as the planar unit distance problem.
Cognitive skills assessed in the studies included memory recall, decision-making, and response speed and accuracy. When these assessments were taken as a whole, short-term fasting (with a median duration of 12 hours) didn’t significantly change the scoring.
The mastodon account @roots@stefanbohacek.online is posting images from the Wageningen University and Research database of root system drawings, I thought the Lemmings could appreciate them as well.
Banner image: Poison dart frog of the species Ranitomeya aetherea, described from the Juruá River Basin, western Amazon, in 2023. Image courtesy of Alexander Mônico.
The Upper Nicola Band released 11 captive-born owls in spax̌mn — part of a decade-long effort to reinstate the tiny birds of prey whose populations have plummeted
Salmon are becoming river “ghosts” as brutal droughts and violent floods cause unprecedented losses on their treacherous journey to the Pacific Ocean, scientists say. A study led by the University of Essex; NOAA Fisheries; University of California, Davis; and Cramer Fish Sciences has found that young Californian Chinook salmon face a deadly double threat from extreme weather and the destruction of historical wetland habitats they rely on.
A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that the brain is more mechanically connected to the body than previously appreciated. Scientists found that abdominal muscle contractions compress blood vessels connected to the spine and brain, pushing fluid that gently moves the brain within the skull. This physical swaying provides evidence for how exercise might benefit brain health by washing away cellular waste.
For decades, coral reefs throughout the Caribbean have been suffering from disease, pollution, overfishing and rising sea temperatures, yet most have continued to grow—until now.
The Timor green pigeon, which is under pressure from hunting and habitat loss, is at serious risk of extinction and should be uplisted to Critically Endangered, according to a new study from researchers at Charles Darwin University and BirdLife International.
Banner image: Deforestation, climate change and trade pose threats to the species, which has dwindled to a few hundred from some 750,000 in the 1960s. Image by kaysud via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).
A team led by Takao Mori at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) published this work in Nature (vol. 652, pages 643–649, 2026). The paper introduces TEGNet, a neural network that predicts thermoelectric generator performance with greater than 99% accuracy while using only 0.01% of the compute time of commercial finite-element solvers.
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