Find out why the Smile spacecraft was delivered to French Guiana and what it will measure in space. The joint ESA–Chinese Academy of Sciences mission on a Vega-C rocket has a launch window from 8 April to 7 May 2026, and its X-ray and UV cameras should for the first time provide a complete picture of Earth’s response to the solar wind.
Find out how UC San Francisco scientists in Nature Neuroscience showed that the interval between rewards—not the number of repetitions—speeds up associative learning. In experiments on mice, they tracked the dopamine signal and compared short and long intervals. The findings raise questions for school, addictions, and artificial intelligence.
Learn how MIT researchers developed microscopic silicon metastructures that use excess heat in a chip instead of electricity for analog matrix-vector multiplication – a key operation in machine learning. We bring what the paper published in Physical Review Applied shows, what applications it promises for thermal monitoring of electronics, and where the current limits are.
Learn why the mitotic spindle, the key cellular "machine" for separating chromosomes, can withstand large forces. A team from UC San Francisco in Current Biology describes how fibers under load quickly renew and further strengthen. In an experiment with a microneedle in living cells, self-repair was recorded that helps DNA divide precisely into two cells.
Find out how CMS physicists at CERN's LHC, along with a team from MIT, observed in lead-ion collisions that quarks leave a “wake” in quark-gluon plasma. Using the Z boson as a neutral tag, they showed that this primordial medium of the early universe behaves like a thick liquid rather than a random scattering of particles.
Here’s what ARPA-H’s $25.8 million support for UC San Diego means: Prof. Shaochen Chen’s team, under the PRINT program, aims to use 3D bioprinting, AI vascular design, and iPSC cells to create a patient-compatible liver and reduce waiting lists, the need for donors, and lifelong immunosuppression in the U.S.