The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.
“Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the droughts associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe,” said Katherine Power, a doctoral student in the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University and the study’s first author.
The study’s MIT co-authors include Sina Kheiri, Jessica Shah, Shashaank Venkatesh, and Roger Kamm, along with Peiyuan Chai and Ryan Flynn at Harvard University.
“Moving is good”
Blood vessels are tricky to grow and control using conventional fabrication techniques. While 3D printers can produce vessels at the scale of major arteries and veins, the technology is not precise enough to print intricate networks of much finer, thread-like capillaries. Scientists have had some success with growing blood vessels from individual cells, by cultivating them in Petri dishes filled with nutrients and growth factors. But controlling how and where they grow remains a challenge.
Kimi K3 is available today on Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API. At launch, Kimi K3 will use max thinking effort by default, with low-and high-effort modes to be introduced in subsequent updates. We are currently working closely with inference partners and open-source maintainers to align technical details and ensure a reliable rollout across the ecosystem. The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026. Further details on the architecture, training, and evaluations will be released alongside the Kimi K3 technical report.
Kimi K3 is the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It marks the latest step in Kimi’s sustained push at the scaling frontier: for nine of the past twelve months, Kimi models have set the upper bound of open-model sizes.
Kimi K3 is built on Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), two architectural updates designed to improve how information flows across sequence length and model depth. We have also scaled up Mixture of Experts (MoE) sparsity, effectively activating 16 out of 896 experts when paired with a Stable LatentMoE framework. Together with refined training and data recipes, these structural changes yield an approximate 2.5× improvement in overall scaling efficiency compared to Kimi K2, allowing the model to convert compute into intelligence more effectively.
Researchers including those from the University of Tokyo found a way to optimize how cells bind to small packages they release called extracellular vesicles. By coating the vesicles with metal ions, they made cells and their corresponding vesicles stick together more strongly than they would naturally. This reduced the time needed for cells to capture their own vesicles, even in mixtures containing billions of other vesicles. The team demonstrated an application of this by improving two kinds of blood tests for cancer cells, and it could have downstream applications in drug delivery, rejuvenation and more.
Anyone afflicted with cancer will often face a long and difficult journey. The early stages of any medical intervention will necessarily include a biopsy, tissue sample collection, such as a liquid biopsy which uses a blood sample. These aren’t perfect, but medical researchers are trying to improve them, with one such method being how to amplify the signals indicating cancer cells. This should be possible as all cells release tiny telltale particles known as extracellular vesicles. Professor Keisuke Goda from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo and his team members found a way to engineer extracellular vesicles in a way never seen before which could improve liquid biopsies and aid in some other medical and research applications in drug delivery, rejuvenation and more.
“Each extracellular vesicle is only about a thousandth the width of a human hair and carries a tiny sample of material from the cell that made it like a little molecular ‘message in a bottle.’ Cancer cells release these packages too but finding them in blood is like searching for a few specific grains of sand on a beach,” said Assistant Professor Tianben Ding from the Department of Chemistry. “So, we developed a simple way to make both the packages and the cancer cells much easier to find. By coating the packages with tiny amounts of lanthanide metals, we made matching packages and cells stick together over 25 times more strongly. This provides a versatile platform that can improve how engineered extracellular vesicles interact with their target cells, enabling applications ranging from cancer detection to targeted drug delivery and rejuvenation.”
A research team led by SKKU professor Hosung Seo of the Department of Quantum Information Engineering and the SKKU Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Washington, has identified—for the first time—an atomic defect structure in the zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductor with outstanding properties for use as a “spin qubit,” a core building block of future quantum computers, quantum communications and quantum sensors.
The results are published in PRX Quantum.
Electron spins trapped at point defects in solid-state crystals can operate at room temperature and retain quantum information for long periods, making them a leading platform not only for quantum computing but also for quantum communications and ultrasensitive quantum sensing. The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been the most prominent candidate, but diamond is difficult to grow into large-area, high-quality crystals and is poorly suited to standard semiconductor fabrication, posing major obstacles to the integration and mass production of quantum devices.
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived, nearly stable states and, if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.
Many modern atomic clocks and quantum computers have so-called trapped ions at their core. Ions, electrically charged atoms, can be in many different states, all with different amounts of energy. Because of their charge, these ions can be suspended in empty space and kept in place using electromagnetic fields. The operation of the clock or computer then relies on precisely controlling which energy state an ion occupies.
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have now discovered that the ytterbium ion (Yb⁺), a leading candidate for both technologies, can remain in previously unexplored states for surprisingly long periods.