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Nature's science-fiction feature Futures ran a short story depicting numbered workers confined to a windowless facility, sedated with pills and coffee, weaving filaments under fluorescent light while elders recall a vanished world of trees. The piece imagines a future where natural landscapes have been erased and human labor is mechanized, monitored, and chemically controlled.
The US National Science Foundation will issue its fewest new grants in four decades after withholding roughly $1 billion for the White House's Grand Research Challenges initiative and pulling back recommendations for over 150 peer-reviewed proposals. Meanwhile, the National Natural Science Foundation of China is increasing its prestigious early-career grants by 50% this year, moving in the opposite direction as Washington retreats from research investment.
German Aerospace Center researchers report that Mercury's diameter has contracted by up to 14.5 miles since its formation, 10 to 30 percent more than earlier estimates suggested. The team says debris from impact craters had masked the true extent of this shrinkage, which stems from the planet gradually losing internal heat.
A cultural essay examines why science fiction media overwhelmingly favors dystopian and pessimistic futures rather than hopeful ones, citing examples from Metropolis and 1984 to Elysium and Terminator. The piece traces this tendency to sci-fi's role as a vehicle for social critique and to the genre's habit of dramatizing unchecked or unequal technology as the source of societal collapse.
Paleontologists studying microscopic pores on fossilized Fusioolithus eggshells, linked to massive titanosaurs, concluded these giant dinosaurs could not incubate eggs by sitting on them due to their enormous size. Instead, the study led by Kohei Tanaka and Darla Zelenitsky suggests titanosaurs buried their volleyball-sized eggs in piles of decaying vegetation, similar to how modern crocodiles incubate their nests, even in surprisingly cool, far-from-equator climates.
The US National Science Foundation is moving to a 'portfolio-based' funding approach that blends traditional investigator-driven research with agency-directed priorities, according to an internal letter. The agency has not specified what these directed opportunities will entail, leaving staff and researchers uncertain about future funding categories.
Dr. Itamar Shatz, author of a new book on procrastination, argues there is no universal cure-all for putting off tasks. Instead, he offers five research-backed insights explaining why people delay even things they genuinely want to do and how they can address that behavior.
Researchers applied mass spectrometry-based proteomics to analyze adhesives and glues found on a range of ancient Egyptian artifacts without damaging them, publishing their findings in Science Advances. Alongside expected animal collagens and egg proteins, they identified plant-derived proteins from sesame and moringa (drumstick tree) sources, expanding the known palette of binding materials used by ancient craftspeople.
A Wall Street Journal report cites experts recommending anthropology, mathematics and philosophy as college majors better suited to an AI-driven job market than computer science, whose recent graduates face a 6.1% unemployment rate versus a 5.7% overall rate. The experts argue these fields build distinctly human skills—like understanding behavior and abstract reasoning—that AI cannot easily replicate, even as long-term demand for software developers remains strong.
Snap! is a block-based programming environment designed to be approachable for beginners while still supporting rigorous computer science education. It extends the block-programming style popularized by Scratch but adds features that let users build higher-order functions, recursion, and other advanced concepts typically reserved for text-based languages.
Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark built a nanolaser small enough to potentially be embedded by the thousands on a single microchip, letting devices transmit data as light rather than electrical signals. The work, led by professor Jesper Mørk with colleagues Meng Xiong and Yi Yu, appeared in Science Advances.
A survey of 4,262 UK adults by the Policy Institute at King's College London and Sense about Science found that 63% of respondents trust scientists highly, while only 5% expressed strong distrust. Regression analysis showed that feeling scientists are 'on their side' and perceiving them as open and transparent mattered more to respondents than judgments of scientific expertise or general benevolence toward society.