Science Bytes

By equipping narwhals with oceanographic sensors, researchers mapped remote, ice-choked coastal waters in East Greenland that are mostly inaccessible to ships. The data reveals that warm, highly saline Atlantic water is...

For years, Denisovans were a phantom lineage known mostly from DNA, teeth, and a single finger bone. Now, two fossilized leg bones dredged from a seafloor channel off the coast of Taiwan provide rare evidence of their...

The Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA, possessed a functional ribosome and complete nucleotide synthesis, but its metabolic network was drastically incomplete. By analyzing hundreds of core reactions across modern...

A recent Phase 1 trial investigated whether swallowing capsules of donor gut bacteria can reprogram the immune system to tolerate peanuts. Researchers administered the pills to adults with severe peanut allergies...

Glioblastoma is an aggressive brain cancer that almost inevitably returns after surgery due to resilient cancer stem cells. While most tumors gorge on sugar to grow, recent research reveals that glioblastoma stem cells...

Recent research reveals that while ordinary El Niño events cause temporary weather disturbances, extreme versions of this phenomenon leave a much longer footprint. When sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific...

For centuries, philosophers have debated whether human thoughts are literally made of words. Recent neuroscience research investigates the human brain to reveal that formal logical reasoning is actually separate from...

What would an alien Dyson sphere — a shell built to capture a star's entire energy output — actually look like to our telescopes? A single-author study by Amirnezam Amiri models the infrared signatures of these...

For the last ten thousand years, human evolution has been running on overdrive to keep up with massive lifestyle changes like farming. By analyzing over 15,000 ancient genomes alongside modern DNA, researchers mapped a...

How a desert lizard's venom became the best-selling medicines on Earth. We trace the science of GLP-1 receptor agonists from 1990 — when endocrinologist John Eng isolated exendin-4 from Gila monster venom, a hormone...

Part 4 of 4, the finale. Cold fusion never quite died — and lately it has been revived by unlikely backers. We trace Google's multi-year, multi-lab investigation and NASA's lattice-confinement work, the newer research...

Part 3 of 4. Cold fusion's most reproducible finding is also its strangest prerequisite: you have to cram deuterium into palladium past a critical loading ratio — roughly 0.85 to 0.90 deuterium atoms per palladium atom...

Part 2 of 4. If cold fusion really released nuclear-scale energy, it should betray itself two ways: as heat you can measure and as nuclear ash you can detect. We dig into calorimetry — how you actually measure excess...

Part 1 of 4. Before we can weigh the extraordinary claim of cold fusion, we need the ordinary physics it defies. We build the yardstick: the electrostatic Coulomb barrier that keeps two nuclei apart, the quantum...

Thermophotovoltaics: Turning White-Hot Heat into Electricity with No Moving Parts This episode was generated by AI from the cited research paper.