Abstract Biodiversity is increasingly threatened by local extinction under global climate change. This may reflect direct effects of climate on poorly adapted native species or increased impacts of exotic species in these conditions, but their relative importance is poorly understood. By examining global occurrence records of 142 plant species found in the Yangtze River Valley,…

After a decade building quantum-computing hardware, Jacques Carolan decided he needed a change. “I wanted to work on technologies that were more directly related to human health,” he says. So in 2021, he pivoted to neuroscience with the aim of building optical technologies to understand the brain. Last year, another opportunity turned Carolan’s head. The…

Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Five years before OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT, Google published a paper called “Attention Is All You Need” that laid out the fundamental transformer architecture underlying today’s AI boom. Five years before Moderna administered its first Covid mRNA vaccine, it dosed its first mRNA vaccine to a…

In science fiction movies like Frankenstein and Re-Animator, human bodies are revived, existing in a strange state between life and death. While this may seem like pure fantasy, a recent study suggests that a “third state” of existence might actually be present in modern biology.  According to the researchers, this third state occurs when the…

There are some species that have persevered through mass extinctions, climate shifts and the relentless pressures of evolution. Others, with their centuries-long lifespans, have outlasted predators, endured environmental shifts and witnessed more of Earth’s history than humans could ever experience. Such species’ amazingly long lifespans could, interestingly, mean one thing—they probably don’t see time as…

Since time immemorial, humanity has always pondered the subject of life and death. While the concept of life beyond death remains a moot point, with no substantial proof, in general life and death are considered antithetical. Death is viewed as the complete cessation of life. However, a new study now suggests that life and death…

Physicists have nailed a fiendishly difficult measurement — the mass of the fundamental particle the W boson. The result, from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is in line with the predictions of the standard model, and pours cold water on an anomaly in the W boson mass that surfaced in 2022.…

Institutional filing cabinets hoard tens of thousands of evaluation studies.Credit: HUM Images/Universal Images Group/Getty On 22 and 23 September, world leaders will meet in New York City at an unusual Summit of the Future. Devised by United Nations secretary-general António Guterres, the meeting aims to bolster global efforts to build a better world. Guterres is…

Suppose you’ve outgrown your beginner pair of binoculars and want to upgrade to a pair with better optics, wider objectives and stronger magnification. In that case, we think the Celestron Nature DX 12×56 are a perfect fit that won’t break the bank. And the good news is you can pick them up for less than…

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death. Usually, scientists consider death to be the irreversible halt of functioning of an organism as a whole. However, practices…