Vasily Belokurov is one of three winners of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. The award is for uncovering fossil evidence of past galactic mergers that prove how the Milky Way evolved. No matter ...

Switches drive nearly every machine. A new one, made of folded DNA, does the same work at the scale of molecules. Scientists have long dreamed of developing nanoscale machines, but building reliable ...

Imagine if one company could become the railroad, electric utility, and cloud-computing provider of the emerging space economy. That potential fueled excitement around the long-anticipated initial ...

A tiny robot developed by Japan's space agency operated autonomously on the moon for more than 100 minutes and sent a series of images back to Earth. Exploring the moon’s surface lays crucial ...

In May, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote an op-ed suggesting AI chatbot Claude may be conscious. Dawkins did not express certainty that Claude is conscious. But he pointed out that ...

There’s truth to the old adage, “Age is just a number.” People of the same age differ vastly in health and mental capabilities. One 80-year-old may be vibe coding with Claude, while another is ...

As demand for electric vehicles and grid storage surges, battery makers are searching for alternatives to lithium that are cheaper and easier to source. New research suggests sodium-ion batteries, ...

AI can rifle through enormous libraries of information to connect far-flung ideas—conceptual leaps remain a purely human skill. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90, has intrigued ...

The unassuming vial of eye drops could easily belong on a pharmacy shelf. But swirling inside are microscopic bits of photosynthetic machinery made from plants. Within minutes of giving the drops to ...

As the AI boom accelerates, governments and utilities are struggling to keep pace with the industry's huge energy demands. New figures suggest data centers now consume about 6 percent of electricity ...

AI has aced medical exams, but there's a wide gap between tests and the real world. A new study suggests the divide is closing. Emergency doctors make high-stakes decisions in fast-paced, often ...

AI long ago surpassed humans at games like chess and Go. Now it's powering robots that can challenge top athletes. Peter Dürr could barely follow the table-tennis ball as it zoomed across the net, ...