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Pull up the most recent data on how Americans rate their own lives, and a strange thing happens to the political map. The reds and the blues, the coasts and the heartland, the places that cannot agree on anything: line up their life satisfaction, their depression rates, their trust in the people next door, and the differences start to blur. Nearly everyone is doing worse. And nearly everyone is d…

Iron, iodine, the fatty acids in oily fish: feed them to a deficient teenager and, sometimes, their scores on a memory test or a nonverbal reasoning task tick upward. Sometimes. The frustrating word runs through the whole literature, because just as often nothing moves at all, and the supplement that worked in a Mexican village fails in a Dutch classroom. Researchers at Swansea University have sp…

Show a stranger a photograph of a teenager and ask how old she is, and the odds are good they will guess too high. Hand them a picture of a woman in her sixties and the guess tends to drift the other way, shaving off a couple of years. Somewhere in the middle, around the early forties, the eye gets it roughly right. This is not a quirk of one careless observer. It is a pattern that held across mo…

Every day your kidneys filter something like 180 litres of blood, sieving out waste while clinging to the things your body wants to keep. When that machinery starts to fail, it rarely does so loudly. Protein begins leaking into the urine, the filtration rate creeps downward, and the slide, once it starts, tends to keep going. For a huge slice of patients, doctors have had little to throw at that …

At a Finnish sawmill, a felled tree gets sorted in seconds. The straight, fat trunk beco New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

Florida is where woke goes to die. Governor Ron DeSantis said it more than once, and he said it with relish, borrowing the cadence of Winston Churchill’s defiance against the Nazis to announce a fight against, of all things, pension fund managers who weigh climate risk. We will fight the woke in the businesses, he declared, and in government agencies, and in the schools. The enemy, in this tellin…

Water is the enemy. In the terahertz band, that slice of the spectrum wedged between microwaves and infrared light, water swallows the radiation more than a million times more greedily than it swa New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. Water is the enemy. In the terahertz band, that slice of the spectrum wedged between microwaves and …

Fatherhood, it turns out, may keep some men alive. Among Black men followed for nearly four decades in a major US heart study, those who had children were only half as likely to die by middle age as those who didn’t. That protective edge showed up nowhere else in the data. White fathers, oddly, got no such bonus. The finding lands in the American Journal of Public Health, drawn from one of the lo…

A month. That is roughly how long Viktor Lilja used to wait just to teach a computer enough about light to be useful. Not the calculation itself, mind you, but the grind before it: generating the training data, one painstaking point at a time, each one taking anywhe New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

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The worms arrived in hamster guts already knowing their job—migration to the small intestine, decades-long survival, the careful dance of parasitic coexistence. What they didn’t know was that their makers had quietly rewritten a crucial instruction into their genome: produce an antibody. Make it. Secrete it. Let it slip into the bloodstream of the animal that hosts you. Then, perhaps, save a life…

First you kill the yeast. Heat it to 80C for half an hour until nothing in it is alive, then fold it together with wood fibres, a little seaweed extract, some plant New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. First you kill the yeast. Heat it to 80C for half an hour until nothing in it is alive, then fold it together with wood fibres, a li…

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Swap a data centre’s coal-fired electricity for bioenergy and, on average New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

Buried in a sliver of silicon sits a single atom of antimony, and inside it, a nucleus spinning in one of eight possible states. Those eight states are doing a job. They are holding quantum information, the fragile raw material of a f New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.

AI Identifies a Ray’s Prey From the Sound of Cracking Shells A whitespotted eagle ray feeds on hard-shelled mollusks in its natural habitat. The distinctive crunching sounds produced during feeding are helping FAU researchers develop AI-powered tools to monitor predator-prey interactions beneath the ocean surface