In the classic guessing game “20 Questions,” imagine asking “animal, vegetable, or mineral?” to help narrow down the answer.

For the ancient sea worm Perinereis cultrifera (which is still around to this day), the answer is surprisingly complicated. This species and other predatory bristle worms have powerful jaws made from structural proteins combined with ions. They use these jaws to bite, crush, and consume food.

The jaws are so unusual in both composition and performance that some scientists have proposed a new name for materials like them: bio-metals. Their study is becoming an emerging area of biophysics.

What Makes a Material a Bio-Metal?
The term “bio-metal” describes more than a biological material that simply resembles metal. Scientific literature has previously used phrases such as “metallike biomaterials” or “biomaterials with metallike properties” for natural substances that approach metals in strength or electrical conductivity.

Bio-metals, however, are defined through a broader combination of characteristics. These include hardness, the way the material responds to strain, and its internal structure of proteins and ions.

Researchers from TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology) and the University of Vienna examined the metal-like behavior of the worm’s jaws in an effort to more clearly define this proposed category. Their findings were published in Biophysics Reviews, by AIP Publishing.

The shrinking of computer chips has exposed a stubborn problem: even when a semiconductor can carry electricity efficiently, getting that electricity into the material can waste power and slow the device down.

Researchers in South Korea have now demonstrated a possible way around this obstacle. Their design allows electrical current to move smoothly from a conductive region into a semiconducting region without crossing the conventional junction between two separate materials. The team also directly mapped the movement of charges at the nanometer scale, providing experimental evidence that the new interface does not disrupt the current.

The advance could support the development of smaller and more energy-efficient electronics, including AI processors, low-power devices, and future logic chips.

Why Contact Resistance Holds Back Smaller Chips
Modern transistors depend on metal electrodes to deliver electricity into a semiconductor. However, the boundary where those materials meet can resist the movement of electrical charges. This contact resistance consumes energy, produces heat, and limits how much performance engineers can gain by making transistors smaller.

The problem is particularly important for two-dimensional semiconductors. These materials can be only one or a few atomic layers thick, making them attractive for electronics that may eventually need to operate at dimensions beyond the practical limits of conventional silicon. Yet their extreme thinness also makes it difficult to create efficient electrical contacts without damaging or altering the semiconductor.

Bacteria can defend themselves against antibiotics with the help of an enzyme released by dying cells, according to a study. This discovery helps scientists understand bacterial survival mechanisms and improve the effectiveness of antibiotics.

The team demonstrated that Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria can produce an enzyme that chemically breaks down the antibiotic, rendering it ineffective.

Because the enzyme is released particularly by dying bacteria, the researchers refer to this as "altruistic cell death," which ensures the survival of the population as a whole. These findings help explain bacteria's collective survival mechanisms, which, in turn, could contribute to improving the effectiveness of existing and future antibiotics.

The project was prompted by a discovery by the study's first author who demonstrated that although bacterial cultures initially die off when exposed to the antibiotic, they eventually recover and continue to grow unhindered.

The team investigated two strains of E. coli bacteria—pathogens responsible for urinary tract infections, among other conditions, as well as septicemia and hospital-acquired infections—and their response to beta-lactams, the most widely used class of antibiotics worldwide. The bacteria produce the enzyme beta-lactamase, which chemically breaks down the antibiotic.

As soon as the antibiotic's concentration fell below a threshold level as a result of enzymatic activity, the bacterial cultures began to recover. "Therefore, the death of some of the bacteria contributes significantly to the long-term survival of the population as a whole, which can be interpreted as an example of altruistic collective behavior," Krug says.

There is something quietly reassuring about a scientific mystery that gets solved not by a dramatic new discovery, but by simply looking again, more carefully, at something we thought we already understood. That’s exactly what has happened with the Sun, and the missing element at the heart of it is silver.

For years, there’s been a nagging problem. The Sun and the meteorites in our Solar System formed from the same swirling cloud of gas and dust, 4.6 billion years ago, which means they should, in theory, contain the same proportions of heavy elements. Meteorites are essentially untouched time capsules from that era, so they can be used as a trusted benchmark. And yet, whenever astronomers measured how much silver the Sun contained, the number always came up short compared to the meteorites but not by a small margin. The Sun appeared to be missing a substantial amount of silver that, by all rights, it should have had.

Now, thanks to new work led by Sema Caliskan at Uppsala University, that mismatch has finally been resolved. The Sun, it turns out, was never missing its silver at all, we simply weren't measuring it properly.

To understand how, it helps to know how astronomers work out what a star is made of in the first place. Starlight carries the fingerprints of every element within it. As sunlight passes through the outer layers of the Sun, atoms of each element absorb tiny amounts of light at very specific wavelengths, leaving faint dark lines in the spectrum. By studying the pattern and strength of those lines, astronomers can work out exactly which elements are present, and in what quantities.

The trouble is, converting that pattern into an accurate number depends entirely on how well you model the Sun's atmosphere in the first place, and previous models were, in hindsight, oversimplified. Caliskan and her colleagues built a far more realistic model, one that accounts for the genuinely turbulent, dynamic nature of the Sun's outer layers, combined with more precise atomic physics describing exactly how silver atoms interact with light and their surroundings. Crucially, the new model also accounts for the fact that light itself affects the very atoms producing those tell tale absorption lines, something earlier, simpler calculations had overlooked entirely.

Researchers have discovered that children's brains can contain cells with their mother's DNA and that these cells can persist for decades.

The findings, which were posted to the preprint database bioRxiv June 10 but have not been peer-reviewed yet, are part of a growing body of work showing that a mother and fetus exchange cells during pregnancy — a phenomenon known as "microchimerism." Previously, scientists had found that a mother's brain harbors cells with her children's DNA.

The findings are important for several reasons, said Amy Boddy, co-director of the Microchimerism, Human Health and Evolution Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. Past work mostly found evidence of maternal microchimerism in infancy, and in blood samples, she told Live Science in an email. "What's exciting here is that it's tissue, not blood; it's real human data, not an animal model; and the methods are cutting-edge."

More broadly, the work reinforces the idea that microchimerism is "a normal process of mammalian biology," Boddy said.

Hunting down maternal cells in the brain
Before this study, there was sparse evidence for maternal microchimeric cells in brains, mostly because it is hard for researchers to get samples of human brain tissue and DNA from both parents and their children.

To overcome this challenge, a team led by Sami Kanaan, a staff scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, analyzed brain tissue that had been surgically removed from dozens of children with severe epilepsy as part of their treatment. The patients ranged in age from 28 days to 19 years at the time of their surgery, and their mothers provided DNA samples through cheek swabs.

Kanaan's team used a tool called quantitative PCR to identify and count maternal cells hiding among millions of cells in the children's brains.

"Guardrails" built by the EU to govern AI fall short in both ambition and execution and have become too heavy to absorb rapid changes in technology, a new study in Big Data & Society warns.

The rules took years of negotiations and political effort and are difficult to change but not to remove, making them a "rigidity trap in action."

Recent changes have amounted to a "partial retreat" before the EU AI Act has been fully implemented, experts have said. The European Union's 2024 AI Act, supposed to take effect this year, has already been replaced with the 2026 AI Simplification Act.

The study says the EU's regulatory framework fails to fulfill the European Commission's stated goals of promoting trustworthy, human-centric and rights-respecting AI.

In contrast, in the U.S.—more by accident than design—there are "regulatory leashes" that can be pulled in response to need, and these are more binding and enforceable than the EU guardrails. Rules are more concrete and easier to enforce.

The study, by Alison Harcourt of the University of Exeter, Claudio M. Radaelli of the European University Institute and Philipp Trein of the University of Lausanne, says the EU's efforts to anticipate AI risks and impose comprehensive rules made adaptive regulation hard to develop. This has made the AI Act hard to enforce and limited its capacity to protect human rights and public values.

The United States intervenes legislatively when specific risks are clearly present or on a sector-by-sector basis. The study says this approach is more enforceable than the EU AI Act, and the state-by-state and sector-by-sector evolution of rules provides more space for learning from experience.

Silicon chips have driven the computing revolution for more than 50 years. Now, researchers are finding new ways to use them in biology, including monitoring large groups of neurons, sequencing DNA, and even manufacturing DNA itself.

A Harvard-led research team has developed a silicon chip that can synthesize 64 different DNA sequences at the same time. The work, published in Nature Electronics, replaces the solvent-heavy chemistry commonly used in custom DNA production with a water-based enzymatic method.

Rather than controlling DNA synthesis with conventional laboratory equipment, the chip uses precisely regulated electric currents to activate chemical reactions at individual locations across its surface. The research was led by Donhee Ham, the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

A Chip That Writes DNA in Water
Synthetic DNA plays a central role in many areas of modern science and medicine, including diagnostics, genome engineering, and cancer research.

Most synthetic DNA is currently produced through phosphoramidite chemistry. This well-established process can create millions of sequences in parallel, but it relies on hazardous organic solvents and is usually carried out in large, centralized facilities.

Enzymatic DNA synthesis offers a gentler alternative. It takes place in water and more closely resembles the way living cells naturally assemble DNA. In the future, this approach could make DNA-writing devices smaller, safer, and easier to use.

Until now, however, enzymatic methods have lagged far behind conventional chemistry in the number of DNA sequences they can produce simultaneously. Previous systems had created no more than about a dozen sequences at once.

The Harvard team raised that number to 64 distinct sequences, with each one reaching a length of up to 39 nucleotides. The result establishes a new benchmark for parallel enzymatic DNA synthesis.

A prominent computer scientist argues that a proposal made by Alan Turing, widely regarded as the father of theoretical computer science, sent artificial intelligence research in the wrong direction for the past 75 years.

In his new analysis, “Turing’s Mistake: Escaping the Yoke of Unintelligent Machines,” Peter J. Denning examines ideas Turing advanced in 1950. At the time, many scientists believed that human intelligence could exist independently of the body and might therefore be recreated as software running on a digital computer.

Denning also disputes the idea that machine intelligence can be demonstrated through an imitation game (now known as the Turing test).

“These two claims have shaped much of AI research and development,” Denning writes. “My premise is that our acquiescence to these claims has led to the AI mess in which we find ourselves today.”

According to Denning, the artificial intelligence (AI) systems now being developed are unlikely to produce human-level intelligence, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI). Instead, he warns, they may create serious dangers without ever thinking like humans.

Why Tacit Knowledge Matters
Central to Denning’s argument is the idea of tacit knowledge. This refers to the enormous amount of human understanding that people possess but cannot fully express in words or translate into symbols that a machine can process.

Denning describes five broad forms of tacit knowledge that he says ‘elude machine learning’. They include common sense, everyday interactions with people and the environment, feelings and perceptions, practical skills, and the cultural and historical background shared by societies.

Researchers have spent decades trying to record common sense in a form computers can use. Beginning in the 1980s, Douglas Lenat’s ambitious Cyc project set out to build a vast database of common-sense facts. After 40 years of work, the project contained 25 million entries.

“Yet even this treasury could not add up to a background of common sense sufficient to make expert systems smart enough to be experts,” Denning notes. “Cyc validated that much of the knowledge that makes people experts cannot be articulated as propositions.”

A quantum computer does not usually bring musical instruments to mind. Yet inside a chip developed at ETH Zurich, information is stored in vibrations that behave somewhat like notes resonating through a guitar.

These movements cannot be heard. They occur at extremely high frequencies inside microscopic mechanical resonators, where packets of vibrational energy called phonons carry quantum information. The entire experimental chip measures about 7.5 millimeters long, 2.5 millimeters wide, and 1 millimeter thick (0.30 inches long, 0.10 inches wide, and 0.04 inches thick), making it roughly as wide as a small fingernail.

Led by quantum physicist Yiwen Chu, the team used these tiny resonators as a working memory connected to a superconducting quantum processor. Their results, published in Science, demonstrate a different way to organize a quantum computer, one that more closely resembles the basic structure of the classical computers used today.

“The interaction between the quantum processor and the quantum memory provides a crucial foundation with a view to establishing quantum computers as a powerful and reliable way to perform computations that are not feasible with conventional computers,” says Yiwen Chu.

Borrowing the CPU and RAM Model
Most quantum systems do not clearly separate calculation from memory. Processing and information storage are often closely integrated into the same hardware, which can make it difficult to expand the machine without adding more bulky components.

Chu’s team instead borrowed a familiar idea from conventional computing. In a digital computer, a central processing unit (CPU) performs calculations while data is temporarily held in random access memory (RAM). Separating those jobs allows the processor to retrieve information when needed rather than forcing every part of the system to perform every task.

The experimental quantum architecture follows a similar principle. A superconducting qubit serves as the processor and control unit, while mechanical resonators hold quantum information during the calculation.

“In our quantum working memory, however, information is not stored electromagnetically, as is usually the case today, but rather in the form of mechanical vibrations,” explains Chu.

One of the central assumptions of modern neuroscience research is that the brain's shape and structure affect behavior. Scientists have linked a thicker cortex (the brain's outer layer) to higher intelligence, certain brain wave patterns to better volleyball ability, and higher connectivity between parts of the brain to chess-playing skills. There's a vast number of these so-called brain-wide association studies (BWAS).

But when experts repeat these studies, they can't replicate the results.

This "replication crisis" suggests that a substantial amount of brain-behavior imaging research rests on a shaky foundation. There are myriad problems affecting this area of research, said Randy Ellis, a senior scientist at Oracle who wrote about these issues while working as a biomedical informatician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Some of these issues aren't unique to neuroscience. They begin with what Ellis called the "original sin" of science: Academics are put under huge pressure to publish positive research findings.

But some of these factors do apply specifically to this field.

The problems are big enough that they are "halting the growth and development of science and the curing of diseases," Ellis told Live Science.

Tiny differences, small samples
Several brain studies that could not be reproduced in follow-up work show how problems can creep in. Each of the original papers has over 500 citations, with the number of citations reflecting how much these studies may influence thinking in the field.

For example, a landmark study in 2007 found that the brains of kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder took longer to mature. But a study published earlier this year found that this link vanished once the different rates of aging between boys and girls were taken into account. "That's what made the whole house of cards topple," Matthew Albaugh, co-author of the replication paper and a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Vermont, previously told Live Science.

During the Cretaceous-Paleogene period (ca. 66 million years ago), a massive impact triggered an extinction-level event (ELE), wiping out about three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Scientists have named the impactor that caused this devastation the Chicxulub meteor, after the nearby town of Chicxulub Pueblo in the Yucatan Peninsula in southern Mexico. The impact certainly left its mark, forming a 180-km-wide (112 mi) crater buried beneath the surface and creating thousands of limestone sinkholes filled with water (known as cenotes).

Today, Earth scientists are closing in on the type of impactor that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event. According to the latest findings from an international team of researchers, it may have been a rare type of space rock known as a carbonaceous (CO) chondrite. As they describe in a paper recently published in Science Advances, an advanced nickel isotope analysis of samples from around the world allowed them to narrow down the composition of the Cretaceous-Palaeogene meteorite.

Asteroids and other "space rocks" are essentially material left over from the formation of the Solar System, roughly 4.5 billion years ago. These objects regularly enter Earth's atmosphere, with most burning up and others exploding in mid-air in what is known as an "airburst." However, larger impactors like the Chicxulub meteor, estimated at 10 to 15 km (6 to 9 mi) in diameter, have occasionally reached the surface, causing massive explosions that eject enough material into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and trigger a "nuclear winter."

By analyzing material left behind by the impact, and comparing it to other meteorites that have been recovered on Earth, scientists can determine where the impactor came from in the Solar System. This is precisely what postdoctoral researcher [Georgy V. Makhatadze] and his colleagues at the Institut de Physique du Globe attempted when conducting high-precision nickel-isotope measurements of clay samples that formed from the impact. These samples were gathered over several years from sites around the world.

Jet engines demand materials that can survive tremendous heat and force without bending, cracking, or slowly losing their shape. The strongest candidates, however, often come with a major weakness: they are too brittle to deform safely.

Purdue University engineers have now found a way to overcome that tradeoff in cobalt aluminum (CoAl), an intermetallic compound with potential uses in high-performance turbines. By redesigning the material at the nanoscale, the researchers created a form of CoAl that is exceptionally strong but can still undergo substantial deformation at room temperature.

The advance, reported in Science Advances, could point toward a broader strategy for making notoriously brittle intermetallic compounds more practical for aerospace, energy, and defense technologies.

Why Intermetallics Fracture
Intermetallics contain two or more metallic elements arranged in a highly ordered crystal structure. That atomic order can give them remarkable strength, high melting temperatures, and resistance to creep, the slow deformation that occurs when a material remains under stress for long periods.

These qualities are valuable in jet engines, gas turbines, energy storage systems, and automotive components. Yet the same ordered structures that make intermetallics strong can also prevent them from deforming easily. Instead of bending under force, many fracture, particularly at room temperature.

After an earthquake, survivors can become trapped beneath piles of unstable debris where conventional rescue robots are too large to enter. Tiny flying machines modeled on insects could one day move through these narrow gaps while avoiding fixed barriers and falling rubble.

Until recently, however, aerial microrobots could only travel slowly along simple, smooth paths, falling far short of the rapid and agile flight seen in insects — until now.

AI unlocks insectlike aerial agility
MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can match the speed and agility of their biological counterparts. They developed a new AI-based controller that allowed the robotic insect to perform demanding flight maneuvers, including repeated body flips.

The two-part control system combines strong performance with computational efficiency. Compared with the researchers’ best earlier demonstrations, it increased the robot’s speed by about 450 percent and its acceleration by roughly 250 percent.

The microrobot completed 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds while maintaining control even as wind disturbances pushed against it.

Flight performance approaches living insects
“We want to be able to use these robots in scenarios that more traditional quadcopter robots would have trouble flying into, but that insects could navigate. Now, with our bioinspired control framework, the flight performance of our robot is comparable to insects in terms of speed, acceleration, and the pitching angle. This is quite an exciting step toward that future goal,”

Life has scarcely found a boundary on Earth that it can’t push. While much of life’s diversity exists in lush, bountiful habitats like tropical rainforests and coral reefs, even the most brutal corners of the planet are also occupied. The organisms that thrive in extreme environments — blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, corrosive acid — are what we call “extremophiles.”

Most of these imperiled pioneers are rugged microbes, such as bacteria or archaea. Some have evolved to live in poisonous brine that would fatally pickle nearly everything else. Some can happily grow in subzero temperatures, using special enzymes that chug along where others grind to a halt. Others can shrug off the menaces of heavy metals, ionizing radiation, or the vacuum of space and still thrive.

These organisms aren’t just curiosities. Understanding their resilient biology has many possible applications. Discovering biochemicals that function under extreme temperatures, pH levels, or pressure could be a boon for a broad array of industrial processes. The organisms may also help clean up toxic pollutants by growing, thriving, and digesting where nothing else can. Extremophiles and their enzymes are even responsible for the modern era of genetics and molecular biology.

Extremophiles can also provide a window into life’s deep origins. The planet where life first evolved was a harsh place compared to today, and it likely had high concentrations of toxins and heavy exposure to radiation. By divining the limits of what life can endure today, researchers can get a better idea of what made life possible in the first place, and what has allowed life to adapt to almost any environment.

And if life can be found at our planet’s extremes, then there’s a chance that life may exist elsewhere in the universe. Extremophiles offer a hypothetical peek at alien biology, helping us better imagine what kinds of life forms might evolve on other relatively inhospitable worlds, from our neighbor Mars to far beyond.

Bacteria have spent decades evolving resistance to virtually every antibiotic we have thrown at them. To stay ahead, new drugs must hit targets that existing antibiotics have never touched. A research team at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) has now developed a series of synthetic drug candidates that do exactly that: By blocking an essential molecular supply system, these molecules cut off the bacteria's supply of essential vitamins and starve them to death. The team published its findings in two studies in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Like all living cells, bacteria need vitamins to survive and cause infection. Unlike humans, many bacteria rely on specialized membrane transporters—called energy-coupling factor transporters, or ECF transporters—to actively and efficiently import vitamins from their surroundings into the cell. Block these transporters, and the bacteria run out of essential nutrients and die.

What makes ECF transporters particularly attractive as a drug target is that human cells do not have them. A drug designed to block these transporters would therefore attack the bacteria while leaving human cells largely unaffected, substantially reducing the risk of side effects.