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Science Advances

Peer-reviewed, open-access multidisciplinary science journal published by the AAAS, covering research across natural and social sciences.

Known aliases

  • Sci. Adv.

Current stories

scienceOne report1 publisher

Interior Alaska camp from 13,800 years ago yields the oldest known needles in the Western Hemisphere

Kelly Graf and co-authors report a 13,800-year-old camp in interior Alaska holding the oldest known needles in the Western Hemisphere. Stone tools from the camp resemble Siberian types, a link between eastern Beringia and northeast Asia.

Publishers:livescience.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Stress restarts arthritis flares in mice via a relay involving the sympathetic nervous system and brown fat, a Chiba-led study finds

Chiba University-led researchers report that restraint stress restarts joint inflammation in remission-model mice through brown fat and IL-6. Blocking beta-3 adrenergic receptors or CXCR2 prevented the flares in those mice.

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence40
scienceConfirmed3 publishers

Pollen at White Sands suggests ice age people watched a lake shrink as oak replaced conifers

Researchers report that pollen in White Sands rock shows conifers and a lake 24,200 years ago giving way to oak and sagebrush in two millennia. The authors say the people who left the footprints kept using the area as it warmed.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 40%
Operator
Operator 43%
Investor
Investor 17%

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence58
scienceOne report1 publisher

DREAM protein complex switches on a crossover gene in thale cress meiosis

Thale cress missing parts of the DREAM complex made too little of the gene MER3 and had severely reduced fertility, a Science Advances study found. The findings may point to a conserved fertility mechanism, Phys.org reported, but the work covers one plant.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Double-blind fMRI test at Yale links hydrocortisone to stronger emotional memories

Yale researchers report that cortisol strengthens emotional memories by changing how brain networks communicate, measured in five-second fMRI trials. Each participant was scanned once on hydrocortisone and once on placebo.

Publishers:sciencedaily.com

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

Machine learning lets recycled ductile iron use its scrap impurities as alloying elements

An international team used machine learning to design 17 ductile-iron alloys; 14 had the best strength and ductility in a recycled-iron dataset. The comparison is with other recycled iron, so the case for cutting primary metal use is still a projection.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Salt makes the plant clock protein TIC clump in the nucleus, freeing defense genes

WashU researchers report in Science Advances that salt makes the clock protein TIC gather into droplets in the cell nucleus. The authors suggest TIC could become a target for breeding or gene editing in crops.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence60
scienceOne report1 publisher

Penn's 140,000-article news dataset shows a publisher's lean varying by topic

Duncan Watts's Penn team released more than 140,000 articles from the 2024 U.S. election year, annotated by AI, with a Science Advances paper. The study found that a publisher's political lean can vary considerably by topic, a detail that gets averaged away in a single bias score.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap−10
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

Cereal immune receptors can be reworked to recognize several fungal threats, John Innes team reports

John Innes Centre researchers engineered plant immune receptors to recognize several fungal threats at once, aimed at rice blast. Blast destroys enough rice a year to feed about 60 million people, the centre says. The receptor work itself is still experimental.

Publishers:sciencedaily.com

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives55
Confidence50
scienceConfirmed3 publishers

One week of contact with a healthy neighbor restarted recovery in bleached coral at Stanford

Stanford researchers found that one week touching a healthy Pocillopora damicornis fragment started full recovery in bleached ones. The tests used fragments in lab tanks, so whether the method could rescue wild reef corals is still open.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 41%
Operator
Operator 47%
Investor
Investor 12%

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Workers leaving declining occupations often land in another one, UCLA sociologists say

UCLA sociologist Jennie Brand's team reports in Science Advances that workers in declining occupations have worse upward mobility than those in growing ones. The AI-specific findings were published separately, in the American Economic Association's Papers and Proceedings.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap−10
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Edinburgh algorithm brings Gaussian boson sampling to standard computers

Edinburgh-led researchers built an algorithm that runs photonic quantum simulations on standard computers at around 5% of the compute, the team says. If the figure holds, groups without supercomputer access can test how error-prone photonic hardware behaves.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

Arabidopsis protein SRF3 ends an iron-draining immune response by moving into the cell

Salk researchers report that the protein SRF3 both restores iron balance after a microbial attack and keeps a plant's immune response calibrated. The experiments started in Arabidopsis, a laboratory stand-in for crops such as wheat or corn, so the breeding payoff its authors describe is still a prospect.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

An Alaskan ridge above the Tanana River yields three Ice Age occupations spanning 1,100 years

University of Kansas researchers report more than 80,000 specimens from an Alaskan ridge occupied 13,800 to 12,700 years ago. Three dated components allow a comparison across 1,100 years, if finds are reported component by component.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Review credits optimal-control pulses with inverting nuclear spins about 10 times faster

Pulses designed by optimal control invert nuclear spins about 10 times faster than the conventional pulses used before, a Science Advances review reports. Whether that shortens a whole MRI or NMR scan is a separate question.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Superconducting tube and cast iron reshape a simple coil's field into a nearly uniform one

UAB and Chalmers physicists turned the uneven field of a simple coil into a nearly uniform one using a superconducting aluminum tube and cast iron. The authors call the mathematics exact, and the prototype, cooled below 1 kelvin, matched its calculations closely.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives40
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Iron atoms give an air-stable 2D semiconductor magnetism that a gate voltage can tune

NUS-led researchers doped iron into nonmagnetic PtSe2 and used a gate voltage to tune its six-layer Neel temperature from about 25 K to 55 K. Order strengthens as carrier concentration falls, so a gate gives direct control in an air-stable 2D film.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence58
scienceOne report1 publisher

UCLA study attributes twice as much of 2024's record rain to warming as to El Niño

UCLA researchers report that global days of heavy rain in 2024 ran 20% above baseline, a record that topped 1983, 1998 and 2016. They tie 40% of the increase to global warming and say conditions favor another record in 2027.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Queen Mary physicist links the viscosity life needs to the values of physical constants

Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary University of London argues in Science Advances that physical constants limit liquid viscosity to a range life can use. The university calls it a theoretical analysis, and its account says only that relatively small changes to some constants could alter how liquids flow.

Publishers:sciencedaily.com

Reality

Evidence35
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+50
Incentives50
Confidence45

Earlier coverage

  1. Neanderthals made or used 13 of nearly 600 wooden objects from a Spanish rock shelter

    Science · October 7, 2026 · Confirmed6 publishers

  2. Sequencing of 194-year-old Jonathan the tortoise turns up 287 gene changes unique to him

    Science · October 7, 2026 · Confirmed10 publishers

  3. Mongolian microfossils undercut the case that animals first appeared in the Ediacaran

    Science · October 6, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers

  4. Mongolian microfossils undercut the 590-million-year ceiling on the age of animals

    Science · October 2, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers

  5. Speech clock trained on 2,928 Spanish speakers rates cognitively impaired people as older

    Science · September 30, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers

  6. NASA finds hitchhiking microbes could persist at the lunar south pole, on a one-day clock

    Science · August 19, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers

  7. Thunder as a free seismic source, read through fiber already in the ground

    Science · August 21, 2026 · Confirmed5 publishers

  8. NASA puts survivable lunar microbe refuges at bootprint scale near the south pole

    Science · August 25, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers

  9. Sheeppox DNA pulled from the York Gospels turns library parchment into a pathogen archive

    Science · September 2, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers

  10. Physicists dropped one arm of a superposed atom to test Einstein's equivalence principle

    Science · September 2, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers