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Scientists say it may be possible to protect aging brains from Alzheimer’s with an old remedy — lithium

In a major new finding almost a decade in the making, researchers at Harvard Medical School say they’ve found a key that may unlock many of the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and brain aging — the humble metal lithium.

Lithium is best known to medicine as a mood stabilizer given to people who have bipolar disorder and depression. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1970, but it was used by doctors to treat mood disorders for nearly a century beforehand.

Now, for the first time, researchers have shown that lithium is naturally present in the body in tiny amounts and that cells require it to function normally — much like vitamin C or iron. It also appears to play a critical role in maintaining brain health.

Major climate-GDP study under review after facing challenge

A blockbuster study published in top science journal Nature last year warned that unchecked climate change could slash global GDP by a staggering 62% by century’s end, setting off alarm bells among financial institutions worldwide.

But a re-analysis by Stanford University researchers in California, released Wednesday, challenges that conclusion—finding the projected hit to be about three times smaller and broadly in line with earlier estimates, after excluding an anomalous result tied to Uzbekistan.

The saga may culminate in a rare retraction, with Nature telling AFP it will have “further information to share soon”—a move that would almost certainly be seized upon by climate-change skeptics.

Meet the universe’s earliest confirmed black hole: A monster at the dawn of time

An international team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center, has identified the most distant black hole ever confirmed. It and the galaxy it calls home, CAPERS-LRD-z9, are present 500 million years after the Big Bang. That places it 13.3 billion years into the past, when our universe was just 3% of its current age. As such, it provides a unique opportunity to study the structure and evolution of this enigmatic period.

“When looking for , this is about as far back as you can practically go. We’re really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect,” said Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Frontier Center and lead on the team that made the discovery.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Deep-sky survey detects an X-ray emitting pair of galaxies

By conducting multiwavelength observations with various telescopes and space observatories, astronomers from Tsinghua University and Steward Observatory have detected a galaxy pair exhibiting significant X-ray emission. The finding was reported in a research paper published July 31 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is a deep-sky survey conducted by multiple observatories to study the formation and evolution of galaxies. It combines multiwavelength data from space observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer spacecraft, XMM-Newton satellite, and the largest ground-based facilities, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT), Keck telescopes, Gemini Observatory or the Very Large Array (VLA).

Recently, a team of astronomers led by Tsinghua University’s Sijia Cai conducted a search for Chandra X-ray detected star-forming galaxies in the Southern field of the GOODS survey (GOODS-S). For this purpose, they combined observations from VLA and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), spectroscopic data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and VLT, as well as photometry from HST and JWST.

Anthropic says they’ve found a new way to stop AI from turning evil

AI is a relatively new tool, and despite its rapid deployment in nearly every aspect of our lives, researchers are still trying to figure out how its “personality traits” arise and how to control them. Large learning models (LLMs) use chatbots or “assistants” to interface with users, and some of these assistants have exhibited troubling behaviors recently, like praising evil dictators, using blackmail or displaying sycophantic behaviors with users. Considering how much these LLMs have already been integrated into our society, it is no surprise that researchers are trying to find ways to weed out undesirable behaviors.

Anthropic, the AI company and creator of the LLM Claude, recently released a paper on the arXiv preprint server discussing their new approach to reining in these undesirable traits in LLMs. In their method, they identify patterns of activity within an AI model’s neural network—referred to as “persona vectors”—that control its character traits. Anthropic says these persona vectors are somewhat analogous to parts of the brain that “light up” when a person experiences a certain feeling or does a particular activity.

Anthropic’s researchers used two open-source LLMs, Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, to test whether they could remove or manipulate these persona vectors to control the behaviors of the LLMs. Their study focuses on three traits: evil, sycophancy and hallucination (the LLM’s propensity to make up information). Traits must be given a name and an explicit description for the vectors to be properly identified.

This smarter sound shield blocks more noise without blocking air

A new breakthrough from the Zhang Lab at Boston University is making waves in the world of sound control.

Led by Professor Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE), the team has published a new paper in Scientific Reports titled “Phase gradient ultra open metamaterials for broadband acoustic silencing.”

The article marks a major advance in their long-running Acoustic Metamaterial Silencer project.

Ocean sediments might support theory that comet impact triggered Younger Dryas cool-off

Analysis of ocean sediments has surfaced geochemical clues in line with the possibility that an encounter with a disintegrating comet 12,800 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere triggered rapid cooling of Earth’s air and ocean. Christopher Moore of the University of South Carolina, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the journal PLOS One on August 6, 2025.

During the abrupt cool-off—the Younger Dryas event—temperatures dropped about 10 degrees Celsius in a year or less, with cooler temperatures lasting about 1,200 years. Many researchers believe that no comet was involved, and that caused freshening of the Atlantic Ocean, significantly weakening currents that transport warm, tropical water northward.

In contrast, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis posits that Earth passed through debris from a disintegrating comet, with numerous impacts and shockwaves destabilizing ice sheets and causing massive meltwater flooding that shut down key ocean currents.

Computers reconstruct 3D environments from 2D photos in a fraction of the time

Imagine trying to make an accurate three-dimensional model of a building using only pictures taken from different angles—but you’re not sure where or how far away all the cameras were. Our big human brains can fill in a lot of those details, but computers have a much harder time doing so.

This scenario is a well-known problem in and robot navigation systems. Robots, for instance, must take in lots of 2D information and make 3D —collections of data points in 3D space—in order to interpret a scene. But the mathematics involved in this process is challenging and error-prone, with many ways for the computer to incorrectly estimate distances. It’s also slow, because it forces the computer to create its 3D point cloud bit by bit.

Computer scientists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) think they have a better method: A breakthrough algorithm that lets computers reconstruct high-quality 3D scenes from 2D images much more quickly than existing methods.

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