We've all been there: staring at a job description or a daunting new project and feeling a cold prickle of dread. You have the degree, maybe even the title, but looking at the task ahead, you feel like a total fraud. You're "underqualified"—and it feels like only a matter of time before everyone else figures it out.
A new type of hologram technology has been developed that uses the motion of light as a key, revealing information only under specific conditions. This is gaining attention as a novel approach that can simultaneously overcome the limitations of existing optical communication and security technologies.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have identified a protein from the quagga mussel that can stick to surfaces underwater, even though it lacks a chemical feature long thought to be essential for this kind of adhesion. The protein, called Dbfp7, is the first freshwater mussel adhesive protein to be functionally characterized.
Scientists have discovered the cause of a persistent glitch that continues to disrupt superconducting quantum computers, even when they have built-in defenses. For all their advanced hardware, superconducting quantum computers are vulnerable to errors caused by ionizing radiation from space or the environment. Radiation particles interfere with the chip substrate (the silicon base the processor is built on), which leads to the creation of rogue particles (quasiparticles) that disrupt the qubits, the basic units of quantum computers.
The UK-led OpenBind initiative has reached a major milestone with the release of its first publicly available dataset and predictive AI model, a groundbreaking step toward accelerating the discovery of new medicines using artificial intelligence.
As climate change intensifies, scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about how animals will cope with a more unpredictable world. One way to gain insight is by studying how animals have already responded to natural climate fluctuations. But for long-lived, social animals like humans and other primates, gathering this kind of evidence takes time.
Individual environmental laws, such as those related to the climate or nature conservation, are not sufficient on their own to resolve environmental crises. A new international study led by the University of Eastern Finland calls for decisive changes to the core structures of legal systems in their entirety.
In 2023 and 2024, Earth's average global surface temperature spiked nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius above what was already expected from climate change. Each year was declared the hottest on record and coincided with deadly wildfires, heat waves and historic numbers of climate-related disasters.
A review in Quantitative Biology demonstrates that scientists can now reliably build and combine very large pieces of DNA, making it much easier to redesign microbes such as yeast and bacteria to act as efficient "cell factories." With these advances, whole biological pathways, and even extra chromosomes, can be assembled and inserted into cells, allowing microbes to produce complex products like medicines, fuels, and chemicals more efficiently than before.
Grasslands and associated wildlife in the Great Plains of North America have declined precipitously and are now experiencing an increase in large wildfire activity. In a Journal of Wildlife Management study evaluating habitat use by lesser prairie chickens—a prairie grouse of conservation concern—before and immediately after a 2017 megafire, investigators found that the birds were forced out of formerly high-quality habitat in large, contiguous grasslands and into sub-optimal habitat and smaller grassland patches near cropland.
