What We're Reading

Microsoft announced Tuesday that a team of scientists used artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to plow through 32.6 million possible battery materials ― many not found in nature ― in 80 hours, a task the team estimates previously would have taken 20 years. The results kick off an ambitious effort to create a new generation of batteries less dependent on toxic and environmentally damaging lithium.

New research suggests that two iron-bearing sulphate materials called rhomboclase and acid ferric sulphate could help explain patches and streaks in the clouds around Venus visible in ultraviolet (UV) light. The research has been published in Science Advances.

In 2020, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 visited the asteroid Ryugu and managed to bring precious samples of the space rock back to Earth. And sure enough, years later, we are still gaining insights about this small asteroid and the environment in which it formed thanks to those samples. Today, scientists released the latest findings from Ryugu — that certain organic compounds called PAHs may be able to form in cold areas in space.

A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing’s potential—if only it could be pinned down.

For atmospheric scientists, snowflake morphology helps determine how the flakes descend through the turbulent atmosphere. Now, using a custom-made snowflake-tracking apparatus installed at a ski resort, Tim Garrett, Eric Pardyjak, and Dhiraj Singh at the University of Utah have amassed a unique data set of the shapes, masses, and accelerations of a half-million flakes. Their analysis hints at an unexpected simplicity in the physics that underlies the motion of solid precipitation.

A fundamental trade-off between the resolution of a clock and its accuracy could have important implications for quantum computers, which must measure short timescales accurately.

When, why and how did neurons first evolve? Scientists are piecing together the ancient story.

An upgrade to LIGO, which comes from exploiting the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, makes it easier to spot spacetime ripples that arise from some of the cosmos’s most violent events.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is aweing scientists and the public alike with its spectacular images of distant galaxies and its discoveries of dozens of new black holes. Yet JWST is also rewriting scientists’ understanding of objects on a slightly smaller, more relatable scale: how planets form from swirls of gas and dust around young stars.

Cells of different size classes all have a similar total mass, such that small, numerous cells such as red blood cells contribute the same amount to the body’s total mass as the largest cells, as reported by researchers in the September 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.