Older mice that received a faecal microbiome transplant from younger animals went on to have improved brain plasticity, which suggests their brains could overcome a neurological condition that is typically successfully treated only in childhood
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Faster aptamer screening finds synthetic alternatives to antibodies in days instead of months
Aptamers are short DNA or RNA strands that can recognize and bind to a specific target molecule with high precision. Similar to antibodies, they can be used to detect these molecules or modulate their activity. Unlike antibodies, they are much more stable, can be produced synthetically and can be chemically modified to achieve the desired properties. As a result, they can offer capabilities that cannot be achieved with antibodies.
As demand grows for accurate and rapid diagnostic tools, aptamers are often better suited to these applications than antibodies. However, developing aptamers is both experimentally demanding and time-consuming. A team of scientists from IOCB Prague, led by Dr. Marek Ondruš and Prof. Michal Hocek, has now developed a technology that significantly shortens the development process. Their research is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Novel membrane design advances molecular separation, lithium extraction
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have developed a new class of nanotube membranes that enable exceptionally fast lithium-ion transport.
Driverless cars are on the rise and now we may know why they crash
For the first time, new algorithms may be able to automatically explain why some self-driving cars crash—a question crucial to answer as more autonomous vehicles take to the roads. This new approach, developed by researchers at King’s College London, reviews past events to explain why specific instances of failure happened, in the hope that this can be used to make improvements in the future.
The research was presented at the 2026 IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation.
Self-driving vehicles are increasingly being rolled out across the globe, in cities like London and San Francisco, but collisions and serious breaches of road safety have put pressure on manufacturers to explain why they make the mistakes they do. This is often hard to do, and current methods only provide limited explanations for these.
Post from Dr Brian Keating
The muon g-2 anomaly is real. The experiment just won the Breakthrough Prize. Brookhaven and Fermilab agree to remarkable precision. What’s in dispute is the…
No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe
Two decades on, it is still the most distant landing ever made, and it remains the only one in the outer solar system.
Seven years to get there
Huygens was the lander half of the Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint venture between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian space agency. The European-built probe rode piggyback on NASA’s Cassini orbiter, which launched in 1997 and spent nearly seven years crossing the solar system before slipping into orbit around Saturn in 2004.
Roman Yampolskiy: AI Can’t Be Controlled. We Need to Pause Now!
Roman Yampolskiy spent two decades trying to prove superintelligence can be controlled. He couldn’t — and now says the proof runs the other way: not difficult, mathematically impossible.
If he’s right, we’re building the one machine we can never switch off, and the people building it are racing to do it faster.
Roman is a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville and one of the earliest researchers in AI safety.
We cover: why you’re the squirrel in the human-AI intelligence gap, what the halting problem really says about predicting a smarter mind, why he calls all current AI safety \.