The Scientist
The paper, not the press release. What a result actually establishes, the size of the effect, and the error bars around the headline.
The General Conference on Weights and Measures voted in Versailles to end the leap second, with UTC going continuous on May 20, 2027. UTC may then drift up to 3,600 seconds from Earth's rotation before a leap hour is added.
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Max Planck and Hannover researchers report strong light-sound coupling in a 4 K optical fiber, with no optical or mechanical resonator. The Nature Physics paper is a proof of concept for a prerequisite to fiber quantum buffers and converters.
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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.
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University of Sydney PhD student Daniel Irving classified almost 800 million Martian locations into 2,000 soil classes, called areths. The scheme is labelled provisional, and its plant-growth ranking still awaits tests on Earth and checks by rover.
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Physicists cooled cesium atoms into single-file chains and found indirect evidence of Bethe strings, bound clusters of at least six atoms. Co-author Hanns-Christoph Nägerl says the fit to theory is not proof and does not expect the strings to be long-lived.
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University of Kentucky researchers found essential-oil cockroach sprays killed over 96% on direct contact, but most dried residues killed under 10%. The Scientific Reports study aged residues on ceramic tile and pine wood for up to a month.
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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman named Stephen Cash director of Marshall Space Flight Center, effective Oct. 19. He cited advanced propulsion and nuclear power as the work Cash is meant to lead the center into.
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Researchers testing 118 people found guesses about strangers' tastes were more accurate when the strangers differed more from the guesser. Participants still started from their own ratings, and Phys.org calls the result surprising.
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Melbourne-led modeling in One Earth finds a 20-fold rise in lithium-ion battery demand by 2050 would lift supply-chain emissions tenfold. Cleaner production alone could not contain that growth, the authors found, so they want policy to reach battery size and lifetime.
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Kaberi Dasgupta's McGill-led trial put 27 of 50 people with early-onset type 2 diabetes into remission with a low-calorie diet and supervised exercise. The authors call that rate high for similar trials, but follow-up ended at 24 weeks.
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Columbia and UC Berkeley researchers report in Nature that microplastics spontaneously generate reactive oxygen species in the water around them. The finding offers a chemical route to the tissue damage associated with microplastics, though the authors hedge on harm to people.
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Researchers led by Université de Montréal found 45 people from Montreal's Notre-Dame Cemetery consistent with 100% European ancestry, mostly French. The result tests accounts of settler-Indigenous mixing in New France, for one burial ground only.
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Higher temperatures drove down how much carbon the roots of two common tree species exude, a Dartmouth-led New Phytologist study found. Lead author Thomas Muratore expects exudation to fall wherever temperatures rise and soil nitrogen does not.
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Penn State researchers estimate that about 2% of the natural gas piped into Indianapolis leaks, based on nearly a decade of tower data. They say most of it likely comes from homes and other buildings, not exterior pipelines.
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Two IPC PAS studies used light-activated catalysts and ultrasound to make drug-research compounds at 54% and over 97% selectivity. Both are laboratory proofs of concept, and the diapocynin route's yield was 33%.
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Biologists at four US universities found identical genetic changes in jellyfish lineages separated by more than 600 million years. Most did not track the eyes and other traits that also evolved repeatedly, the authors report.
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Kyoto University researchers report an Fe-4Ni-0.6C steel with nearly 140% uniform elongation, reached by activating twinning and martensite in sequence. The study suggests metals have much greater capacity for uniform deformation than previously believed, Phys.org reported.
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European XFEL researchers report record intensity and fluence for hard-X-ray attosecond pulses, above 10^20 watts per square centimeter. The beam was focused to 180 by 330 nanometers, about 100,000 times smaller than a hair's cross section.
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MIT researchers used a genome-wide CRISPR screen to tie APOE4's myelin damage to suppressed Wnt signaling in human oligodendrocytes. The result gives drug researchers a named pathway to test, though the evidence so far comes from cultured cells and mice.
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Manitoba and Bamfield researchers detected cortisol in North Pacific spiny dogfish blood, a hormone sharks were long thought not to make. The paper covers one species, and its experiments used groups of five or six sharks.
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Konstanz and Max Planck physicists report in Nature Physics that measuring a trapped particle twice can yield more work than measuring it once. The gain comes from a liquid whose internal state they cannot see.
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Flinders University researchers resampled replanted sites over six years and found different parts of the soil fungal community recover at different rates. Vegetation, the usual yardstick of replanting, does not automatically show soil recovery, the Flinders researchers warn.
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Whitehead Institute researchers saw engineered epithelial sheets gain a shared orientation once the cells migrated together, according to a PNAS paper. The experiments used cultured cells, so they show migration can supply the cue and leave open whether embryos use it.
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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.
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Amsterdam and St Gallen researchers link psychological openness among 3.2 million Americans to earlier Airbnb, Uber and Flickr uptake across 349 metro areas. Local temperament is now a candidate explanation for why some places adopt new platforms first. The evidence is an association across regions.
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Ice cloud tops over mountains rose and cooled 2 to 4 times faster than over adjacent lowlands in 2003 to 2022 satellite data, Eos reports. The paper tracked cloud properties, so any effect on mountain water supply is untested.
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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.
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Nottingham Trent researchers made four room-temperature lanthanide liquids that mix into distinct UV light signatures. Each new code then comes from a new mix of the same four liquids, though the tests so far were on paper.
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Cryptography specialists say they are overwhelmed by requests to validate amateurs' GPT-6 Astra cipher solutions, Nature reports. A claimed solution can be ready by morning, and in Nature's two examples each went to one named person for confirmation.
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Simulations of the El Gordo collision, over two quadrillion solar masses, fit two-state self-interacting dark matter better than noninteracting dark matter. Phys.org's account calls the result a possible solution, not a definite one.
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