Science & Research

Researchers at CSIRO, the University of Melbourne, and RMIT have built and tested a quantum battery prototype that completed a full charge-store-discharge cycle for the first time, demonstrating a counterintuitive property where charging speed increases with battery size.

Scientists have detected all five canonical nucleobases in pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu, the first confirmation of a complete set of DNA and RNA building blocks in material collected directly from space.

A Kyoto University team applied three types of shear strain to ultra-thin crystals of the unconventional superconductor Sr2RuO4 and found virtually no change in its transition temperature, ruling out several leading theoretical models and opening new questions about the material's pairing symmetry.

A Science Advances study identifies cell-free ice-nucleating proteins in Mortierellaceae soil fungi, acquired from bacteria via horizontal gene transfer, offering a non-toxic alternative to silver iodide for cloud seeding.

Paleontologists have recovered tiny fossilized teeth of Purgatorius from Colorado's Denver Basin, marking the southernmost occurrence ever documented and suggesting that archaic primates dispersed rapidly across western North America within hundreds of thousands of years of the dinosaur extinction.

An Oxford-led study warns nearly 8,000 vertebrate species face unsuitable conditions by 2100 from combined heat and land-use stress, while a separate Nature Climate Change paper finds that protecting biodiversity hotspots would halve the land available for forestation-based carbon removal.

A 30-year satellite study shows Antarctica lost 12,820 square kilometers of grounded ice, concentrated in West Antarctica's most vulnerable glaciers.

A Stanford-led study published in Science presents the first systematic global catalog of earthquakes originating in the continental mantle, identifying 459 events since 1990 and revealing unexpected clustering beneath the Himalayas and the Bering Strait.

Three major studies reveal invasive species cut insect numbers by 31 percent globally, climate change alone drove a 72 percent decline in a pristine Colorado meadow, and monitoring frameworks cannot yet track whether rescue plans work.

GUARD Archaeology has published findings from a 2017 excavation in Bearsden that revealed a fortified Roman outpost hidden under residential back gardens, offering the clearest evidence yet of a denser surveillance network along the Antonine Wall than historians had assumed.

JWST observations of super-Earth L 98-59 d reveal a sulfur-dominated atmosphere sustained by a perpetual magma ocean, a combination that fits no existing planetary category and may define a new class of exoplanet.

A failed control experiment led Cambridge chemists to discover a metal-free, LED-driven method for modifying drug molecules at positions previously considered unreachable, reversing the selectivity rules established by Friedel and Crafts in 1877.