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In the living world, roughly a third of all proteins we know rely on metals to function. Zinc helps enzymes break down molecules, iron helps carry oxygen in the blood, calcium helps relay signals in cells and potassium flows through channels that help keep our hearts beating. But despite the important role they play, scientists have long struggled to pinpoint exactly where metal ions bind in a protein to get the job done.

The Australian state of Victoria was due to enforce a legal right to work from home starting in September 2026. But just weeks away from its implementation, the new premier, Ben Carroll, announced a year

Eight years of painstaking research on the virtually unknown Wolffsohn

From a skin patch that changes color to flag abnormal blood sugar to a diver

Being able to measure something plays a vital role in our ability to understand many phenomena. But measuring can often affect what we are trying to measure. This is particularly the case when measuring substances that are very small, soft or fragile. In a recent study published in PRX Life, a research team led by the University of Osaka successfully used acoustic tweezers as a contactless method to investigate an important type of fragile material called biopolymer condensates.

A research team has developed a new molecular editing strategy that can directly convert pyridine compounds into their positional isomers. Instead of moving individual substituents around the molecule, the method relocates the nitrogen atom within the pyridine ring itself, allowing existing molecular structures to be reorganized while preserving their substituents.

Every summer is getting hotter. Wildfires are blazing, and the worst is yet to come. There

A functional nervous system depends on the cooperation of many kinds of cells. As developing organisms build their nervous systems, their neurons must take on different forms and functions to fulfill their designated roles. That carefully orchestrated process gives rise to thousands of different cell types in the human brain.

In the global race to build bigger and better quantum computers, researchers have taken a step forward. A new machine called Helios is radically different from other quantum computers.

Artificial intelligence can develop solutions that humans would be unlikely to discover on their own. But what happens when machines do more than solve individual problems and actually discover entirely new solution strategies? And can such discoveries become part of human knowledge?

Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles

Every time a cell divides, it must accurately copy its entire genetic instruction manual. Before this process can begin, cells load their DNA-copying motor

Right-leaning Canadians

An African bat whose presence in Sicily had remained an unresolved zoological mystery for almost two centuries has now been documented on Pantelleria Island. A study published in Global Ecology and Conservation reports the first solid evidence of the Egyptian slit-faced bat (Nycteris thebaica) in Europe, adding not only a new bat species but also the first representative of the family Nycteridae to the European fauna.

According to a study by Brazilian scientists published in the journal npj Biodiversity, most new mammal species described over the past 35 years are housed in institutions in countries of the so-called Global North, even though the vast majority were discovered in poor or developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

Understanding

Scientists can engineer living cells to perform useful tasks, from producing medicines and sustainable chemicals to detecting disease. Unlike traditional engineered systems, living cells are constantly changing as they grow, making their behavior difficult to predict and control.

Counterfeit and out-of-spec components are entering U.S. defense supply chains through thousands of small and midsized suppliers that make up the lower tiers of the industrial base. Researchers at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) say the fix isn

Yesterday, I woke to a cold, damp Canberra morning

Developing new materials to tackle pressing global issues is a gap-filled process that can leave potential climate solutions lost in unread academic papers and forgotten dissertations.

AI optimists will be encouraged by a recent report on the state of the world

Coronins are found throughout the animal kingdom, from single-celled amoebae to humans, and are involved in many vital processes, including immunity, development and cell survival. For decades, textbooks and hundreds of scientific papers have described coronins primarily as proteins that bind to actin, a key component of the cytoskeleton.

For decades, Australia was the last inhabited continent free of the bee-killing Varroa mite (Varroa destructor).

Universities are increasingly turning to oral exams to stop students from using artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat.

In a study published in Macromolecules, researchers introduce a novel polymer that could simplify how materials are applied, removed and recycled by eliminating several complex processing steps used today.

Every year, about 50 million metric tons of plastic is dumped into the environment. This waste entangles, chokes and poisons wildlife worldwide, including sable shearwaters living on the remote Australian island of Lord Howe. After hatching on the island, these birds head out to sea for several years before returning to breed as adults.

Researchers at the University of Sydney have harnessed more than 30 years of data to build a new method to more accurately measure the impact of climate change-induced events on the Great Barrier Reef. The findings are published in the journal Marine Environmental Research.

Scientists have described five new species of parasitoid wasps from Cyprus, more than doubling the number of chalcid wasps known to be found nowhere else on the island. The wasps, all belonging to the family Pteromalidae, are small insects that play an important role as natural pest controllers, yet remain poorly studied across much of southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The study is published in the journal ZooKeys.

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in Marseille, France, have discovered something surprising in the Mediterranean Sea: giant chains of phytoplankton.

A flash of light lasting a fraction of a millisecond could help create better materials for solar energy. Researchers used ultrafast heating at rates of up to 10 million degrees Celsius per second to rearrange the atoms inside a semiconductor, producing a version that generated up to 50 times more electrical current from light than the same material in its ordinary form.

They spotted the first mat of Sargassum seaweed several miles out in Biscayne Bay. The captain of the 37-foot (11-meter) Yellowfin brought the vessel to a full stop, allowing the scientists on board to get a closer look at the brown macroalgae that has been washing ashore by the tons this summer and fouling the shorelines of Gulf Coast and Atlantic beaches.

A team of researchers reports that they may have found rock containing some of the earliest forms of microbial life on Earth. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes the biosignatures found in this 3.5-billion-year-old, carbon-rich, layered rock, called chert.

The recent announcement of novel, viable viruses created by artificial intelligence (AI) was celebrated as a major advance in the fight against antibiotic resistance. But it also raised urgent concerns about regulation.

New research led by University College Dublin has rewritten a key chapter in Irish prehistory, revealing that bones long thought to mark the beginning of farming in Ireland belong to bear and wild boar, not cattle.

When a destroyed section of the Amazon rainforest begins to recover, nature deploys only a few tree species that can withstand poor soil conditions and blazing sun and grow rapidly, a Brazilian study has shown.

In recent years, the Alps have experienced devastating glacier collapses: In September 2023, a section of the Marmolada glacier in the Dolomites collapsed, resulting in the deaths of seven mountaineers. Just over a year and a half later, in May 2025, the Birch Glacier above Blatten collapsed, keeping Switzerland and the entire world in suspense.

Young people who have lived in public housing for at least 10 years are significantly less likely to commit crimes or become victims of crime than their peers in the general population, a study by researchers from the University of Otago, Wellington

From searching disaster zones and responding to chemical spills to monitoring fragile ecosystems, future robot swarms may have to act in places where direct human control is difficult or dangerous. To operate autonomously, the robots must be able to decide together which problem to address and where to go next. But collective decision-making creates its own vulnerability: Robots improve their decisions by sharing information, yet faulty machines, inaccurate observations or manipulated messages c

Between 29,000 and 19,000 years ago, the planet experienced some of its coldest temperatures and drastic landscape changes at the peak of the Ice Age, during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the period of most extensive global ice cover. Humans, despite being unaccustomed to such icy temperatures and surroundings, survived through the age.

A practitioner article published in the SMS Explorer,

Sophie Adenot became the first French woman astronaut to venture outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk Tuesday, accompanied by American astronaut Anil Menon.

Copper sulfide (CuS) catalysts continuously reconstruct their surface during electrochemical CO2 reduction, reports a study from the Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan. By uncovering the mechanism behind the dynamic surface changes that occur during potential-step electrolysis, the researchers revealed how sulfur and oxygen play distinct roles in catalyst activity and product selectivity, paving the way for improved CO2 conversion technologies.

Following another series of alleged killings of women across Australia, the country has once again found itself asking familiar questions: How many more women have to die before we act? What more should governments do? Why does this violence keep happening?

Looksmaxxing, fibermaxxing, proteinmaxxing, T-maxxing. There are so many TikTok trends that promise to optimize our lives.

The narwhal

Anyone who has had to share a room

A major push is underway to catch and vaccinate more than 5,000 little penguins in Victoria to protect them against the virulent H5N1 bird flu.

From wall-mounted smartphone docks to old-fashioned coiled-phone handsets, a growing trend for retro phone accessories may be a sign that many people are looking for ways to create distance from their smartphones.

Close to a phase transition, very different materials can follow the same mathematical rules. The concept of universality, which groups seemingly distinct systems based on their common properties, was developed to describe this phenomenon.

The rules of tag are simple enough for a playground: catch or be caught. But when the players are autonomous drones, the game becomes a test of machine learning, split-second decision-making and cooperative strategy.