© Getty Images/Rest of World
© <p>ThoughtCo. / Brianna Gilmartin</p>
Scientists are discovering that some of the cells linked to aging may also be key to staying healthy. A growing body of research is changing how scientists view one of aging biology’s most studied cell types: senescent cells, often called “zombie cells.” While these cells have long been associated with aging and chronic disease, new [...]A remarkable new study of the world’s oldest verified living person reveals a surprising picture of extreme longevity. Maria Branyas lived through two world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Spanish Civil War, and COVID-19. When she died in 2024 at age 117 years and 168 days, she was the oldest verified living person in [...]A new study challenges the widely accepted idea that word meanings are organized around emotion. After analyzing billions of words, scientists found that language may be shaped by something more basic: the need for safety. Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, [...]
© Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality and feasibility of grant applications, and subject-matter experts within the funding agencies used these ratings to determine which grants got funded. Under the proposed rules, political appointees would have the final say, and they were specifically instructed not to "routinely defer" to peer reviewers.
In the interim, the administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn't circumvent legal requirements, and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process.
The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn't in the "national interest." The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.
© Getty | Al Drago
While we make batteries based on many different chemistries, nothing has approached the massive scale at which we can produce lithium batteries. That scale makes the economics of lithium-ion batteries hard to compete with. Even if we develop a superior battery technology, it's unclear whether we can get manufacturing costs down quickly enough to compete with the efficiency of the lithium supply chain and manufacturing.
The one thing that could change the dynamics is a supply crunch. While lithium is extremely widespread, lithium that can be extracted economically is a different matter. It's cheapest to extract it from brines, and lithium-rich brines are largely limited to South America. We do obtain some lithium from other sources, but it's considerably more expensive.
In today's issue of Science, however, a research team has identified an energy-efficient means of extracting lithium from rocks. The process they've designed uses far less energy than existing ones, regenerates all its starting chemicals, and produces byproducts that could also be sold.
© Cavan Images
With early tests suggesting the presence of crude oil, the Caribbean island has begun to debate whether it could justify becoming a producer
Jamaica is closer than ever to drilling for oil. Tests on samples from the seabed off the Caribbean island’s south coast earlier this year identified hydrocarbons, which suggest the presence of crude oil below ground.
Jamaica imports all its fuel, which costs about $1.5-2bn (£1.1bn-1.5bn) annually, depending on global oil prices. It is a persistent drag on an economy that generated $4.3bn from tourism, its biggest earner, in 2024.
Continue reading...
© Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare
© Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare
© Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to give us the ability to look at one of the earliest periods in the evolution of the Universe, a time when some of the earliest stars were putting out enough light to ionize the hydrogen that accounted for almost all of the normal matter present at the time. There were lots of ideas about what we might see, but the Universe is full of surprises.
One of the first surprises was the existence of what picked up the moniker "little red dots," which are exactly what their name suggests. After some initial arguments, it became clear that these were early versions of the supermassive black holes that presently sit at the center of almost every galaxy. Now, gravitational lensing has allowed astronomers to confirm that a little red dot is little more than a supermassive black hole without much in the way of a galaxy around it.
The little red dot in question is called Abell 2744−QSO1, and gravitational lensing has both magnified it and caused it to appear three times in the vicinity of the galaxy cluster that did the lensing. Based on details in its spectrum, we're looking at the object as it appeared just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
© NASA, ESA, CSA, Lukas Furtak, Alyssa Pagan
Planet Earth has some pretty great qualities going for it. (Negative reviews mostly revolve around the staff and clientele.) Pretty high on the list of positives is a richly oxygenated atmosphere. But that’s something that evolved and built up over a couple billion years, only eventually resulting in a world conducive to animal life like us.
Scientists have many ideas about what could have caused oxygen to increase, and it seems that a number of them are probably correct. No one thing in isolation seems to explain it. Life is part of the story, with photosynthetic life pumping out oxygen. The chemistry of the solid Earth also had a role to play, both through supporting photosynthetic life and through reactions that can shuttle oxygen between the atmosphere and rocks deep inside the Earth.
A new study led by Wei Shi of the Chengdu University of Technology suggests that evidence of changes in the subduction of tectonic plates—the process by which they disappear down into Earth’s interior—lines up with the timing of jumps in oxygen levels.
© AZemdega
Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.In the first landmark publication of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV has addressed recent advances in artificial intelligence by focusing on the threat it poses to workers, social justice and “the dignity of persons”.
Presenting his first papal encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), at the Vatican on May 25, Leo declared: “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
In the document – comprising around 42,300 words in its English translation – the pope writes: “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”
Encyclicals are exceptionally important papal documents that respond to the most pressing social issues of the time. Typically written as letters to all bishops and archbishops, they have become a crucial vehicle for disseminating the theology and political commitments of the Roman Catholic Church across the world.
Leo chose to sign his first encyclical on May 15 2026, the exact anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s “Rerum novarum” (“Of new things”). This famous encyclical, which responded to the technological advances of the industrial revolution, became the foundational document of all modern Catholic social teaching.
Indeed, the current pope probably chose the name Leo because of Leo XIII’s renowned commitment to social justice.
Just as “Rerum novarum” responded to the industrial revolution by emphasising workers’ rights and the dignity of human labour, so too Leo XIV has responded to the explosion of AI technology by emphasising the importance of human over machine intelligence.
In 1891, Leo XIII wrote: “Wage-earners … should be specially cared for and protected by the government.”
Leo XIV now makes similar appeals to world governments about AI: “It is necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power.”
The current pope follows a long tradition of Catholic engagement with new tech – from concerns about the impact of the printing press in the 15th century to the rise of the internet over 500 years later.
Leo XIV’s presentation was preceded by a short film which juxtaposed images of previous popes with major technological innovations. Radio towers gave way to images of broadband centres; early computers to a sea of people holding up their smartphones in St Peter’s Square, Vatican City.
Perhaps the crucial theme of this video was the connection between technology and war. Pictures of second world war aircraft were intercut with the dropping of the atomic bomb, soon followed by images of the 9/11 attacks.
In the encyclical, Leo warns: “The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control.”
Leo XIV isn’t the first pope to address the potential threat posed by AI technology. In January 2025, his predecessor Francis signed off the doctrinal note “Antiqua et nova” (“Ancient and new”) – which called for AI technology “to include the least of our brothers and sisters, the vulnerable and those most in need”.
Leo’s new call for the disarmament of AI is not a demand to discontinue its development, but to regulate AI robustly so it only serves the common good.
In this, the pope drew an analogy with the nuclear disarmament movement, suggesting that both nuclear and AI technologies should only be developed for the good of humanity, and never used as weapons.
Those invited to offer their thoughts on Leo’s encyclical included Christopher Olah, the Canadian billionaire and co-founder of AI firm Anthropic. The appearance of Olah marks the first time a speaker entirely outside clerical or theological circles has been included in such a presentation.
Anthropic is currently locked in a legal dispute with the US government regarding the military application of its AI systems. Leo’s encyclical underlines his concerns about the escalation of war around the world, stating: “It is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”
Olah echoed Leo’s demands for greater social justice around the use of AI, stating: “His Holiness’s call for disarmament is profoundly timely.”
He called for people working outside computer science to contribute to AI governance and ethics – people “beyond the incentives” of financial markets “who can see what we, from the inside, cannot”.
Leo answered Olah by saying: “In the name of the Church, I accept your invitation to walk together, to listen and to speak – and together, to find the way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.”
James Lorenz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Last week, the US government announced $2 billion in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a range of startups in exchange for equity in the companies. Those could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.
But the biggest chunk of money would go to a company that likely wouldn't exist if it weren't for the government's backing. Anderon will be set up with a billion dollars each from IBM and the government and will inherit personnel and IP from IBM. It will serve as a foundry for fabricating quantum processing units and will contract its services out to IBM and any other company that wants access to cutting-edge hardware.
Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.), the ranking member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, made it clear that she is not happy with how the government is using its money to support this technology.
© IBM
Nature Geoscience, Published online: 25 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41561-026-01988-1
Dust derived from Antarctic sources measured in an ice core from the Allan Hills spanning the peak of the Last Interglacial suggests that the Ross Sea was probably open at the time, coincident with a reduction in the volume of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that marks the start of a bloody half-a-billion-dollar offshore supply chain, tacitly supported by Beijing yet covertly concealed from port inspectors globally.
The Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on the protection of endangered species, filed a formal petition this month requesting the U.S. government potentially sanction China for failing to meet American shark conservation standards. Shark populations have declined by more than 70 percent since 1970, with more than one-third of all shark and ray species now threatened with extinction. Yet each year, Chinese-flagged vessels catch, brutally fin, and discard thousands.
Should the National Marine Fisheries Service identify China as having violated the US Moratorium Protection Act, then President Trump could be expected to ban the import of all $1.5 billion of Chinese seafood.
© Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images
Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal, interrupting what had been a long downward trend. But over the course of the year, both trends slowed considerably.
A year later, all of that seems to be in the past, as the US has returned to its normal pattern: slow growth, with renewables pushing coal off the grid. The one oddity is that hydroelectric production has surged without a corresponding increase in capacity, likely due to unusually warm weather in the western US causing the snowpack to melt early. That may have consequences later in the year.
Overall demand in the US grew by only 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period the year before. Often, changes in demand during this part of the year are driven by weather-related heating demand. But the US had an unusual combination set of weather conditions to start 2026, with the western half baking in unseasonal warm temperatures, while the eastern half suffered a deep freeze. So we'll probably need data from more of the year before we read too much into the small rise in demand we've seen so far.
© Getty Images
Login