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Researchers at UC San Francisco tested a surgically implanted 253-electrode array that reads brain activity to simultaneously produce on-screen text and animate a personalized avatar's movements. The system, tested with two participants with severe paralysis, is described as the first brain-computer interface to handle verbal and non-verbal communication together within seconds of intent.
Paul Kammerer, once hailed as a successor to Darwin, killed himself in 1926 weeks after herpetologist Gladwyn Noble revealed evidence that his celebrated experiment on inherited traits had been faked. The scandal, combined with his flair for public self-promotion and unconventional theories like universal coincidence patterns, led many scientists to dismiss his entire body of work. A century later, new scientific findings suggest some of his underlying questions about heredity may deserve renewed attention.
In May 2003, UW-Madison discovered its public NTP time server was being hit by a massive, sustained flood of hundreds of thousands of packets per second from hundreds of thousands of hosts worldwide. Investigation revealed this wasn't a DDoS attack but a design flaw in a popular vendor's cheap consumer routers, which mistakenly hardcoded UW-Madison's server as a time source and queried it far too aggressively.
Researchers at Ege University modeled how the young Sun's evolution would change if it had absorbed a super-Earth-sized planet, and found the scenario helps resolve mismatches between standard solar models and real observations, including the Sun's depleted lithium and internal sound-speed profile. The team also found such a planet could pass through the Sun's outer layers while losing little mass, implying a lasting internal chemical signature.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used AI to analyze over 400,000 Reddit posts from nearly 70,000 users discussing GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound. The analysis, published in Nature Health, surfaced patient-reported symptoms—particularly menstrual changes and temperature issues like chills and hot flashes—that appear underrepresented in clinical trials and regulatory data. The team stresses this doesn't prove the drugs cause these effects, but flags them as signals worth further study.
A team led by Xin Li at Westlake University identified an intermediate-mass black hole, roughly 35,000 times the sun's mass, sitting outside the star-forming disk of the dwarf galaxy UGCA 320, about 20 million light-years away. Hubble imaging and MUSE spectroscopy showing broad Balmer emission confirmed the object is actively accreting material as it drifts through the galaxy, dragging surrounding gas behind it.
A team of researchers, publishing in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, used stellar modeling software to suggest the young Sun may have engulfed a rocky planet several times Earth's mass. They argue this ingested super-Earth could explain persistent mismatches between standard solar models and actual observations of the Sun's interior, including its unusually low lithium levels.
WIRED's roundup of the best standing desks for 2026 includes expert commentary questioning whether standing desks are truly beneficial. Kinesiologist Anne-Kristina Arnold of Simon Fraser University notes that prolonged standing carries its own cardiovascular risks and that research on standing workstations remains mixed. The guide also breaks down the tradeoffs between electric and manual standing desks for buyers.
College students are increasingly engineering workarounds to avoid AI-detection tools used by professors, according to a New York Magazine report. One NYU student built a bot with AI coding tools that completes his WebAssign calculus homework slowly, mimicking human typing speed to avoid raising suspicion from timestamp checks, and has since shared the tool with classmates.
Scientists at the University of Utah, including former BYU football player Larry Carr, are researching intranasal transcranial photobiomodulation (itPBM), a red-light therapy aimed at reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood and motor function. A recent study of 26 BYU football players published in the Journal of Neurotrauma found the therapy may help protect neurological health without requiring reduced playing time or contact exposure.
Researchers at Curtin University analyzed 76 million radio images over 29 days using a prototype SKA-Low station and detected 112,534 unauthorized emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites within the exact frequency band needed to study cosmic dawn hydrogen signals. The leakage, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes not from intentional Starlink transmissions but from unplanned electronic interference radiating through satellite hardware, including periodic 13-kHz tones near 137 MHz.
Emil Barr, who launched Step Up Social from his college dorm room at Miami University, earned his first $1 million within 14 months of starting the business at age 19. Now 23, he estimates his personal net worth at roughly $35 million and has since founded a second company, Flashpass, aimed at addressing AI-driven job displacement.