Alzheimer's sleep loss finally has a cause, and a laptop beat a quantum computer

A University of Kentucky team led by Shannon Macauley and Nicholas Constantino found something different 4. In mice with amyloid plaques, it isn't the plaques doing the damage directly, it's the brain's own cleanup crew. Microglia, the immune cells that swarm in to handle the plaques, kick off a wave of inflammation so broad that Macauley compares it to a kitchen fire triggering the whole house's sprinkler system. When the researchers used a drug to temporarily clear out most of the microglia, the mice got back more than two hours of sleep a day, deep, slow-wave sleep, the kind that actually restores the brain, even though the plaques never budged.

Using tensor networks, a mathematical trick for compressing an otherwise impossibly complicated wave function, they reproduced the same results on modest hardware, some of the calculations ran on a personal laptop, and their answers matched both the theoretical predictions and the quantum computer's own output. The paper landed in Science.

Nobody knew how one animal enforced that on dozens of others until now 21. Researchers found the queen produces a compound called isopropyl myristate, the same ingredient found in a lot of skincare products, and just the smell of it is enough to keep the other females' hormones locked down, even when the queen herself isn't physically present. Behavioral scientist Melissa Holmes called it the solution to a "longstanding mystery."

Before the conversation, people predicted almost nothing would change, that they'd stay put and so would the other person. They were wrong on both counts. Views shifted more than participants expected, on both sides, and the conversations measurably reduced polarization, even on the political topics. A week later, the effect had faded slightly but was still there, and people whose views changed the most right after the conversation were the most likely to stay changed.

It's funded more than 8,000 individual projects: decontaminating toxic sites, fighting invasive species, restoring habitat. And it has survived repeated attempts to cut or kill it, in a political era where almost nothing survives repeated attempts to cut it. Researcher Elizabeth Buchner and a team of graduate students studied why, and found it comes down to a deep, shared regional attachment. As Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga put it this July: "The Great Lakes aren't a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. They're an economic engine, a source of drinking water for millions of people, and part of our way of life."

A University of Cambridge team led by Alessio Terzi pulled together data on more than 4,400 launches across 65 years and 330-plus rocket designs and found the trend follows Wright's Law almost perfectly: every time cumulative payload sent to orbit doubles, cost per kilogram drops by 21.2 percent. Extrapolate that curve and launch could cost $1,569 per kilogram by 2030 and just $273 by 2040.

Building on a gene originally developed at SUNY's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, a double-blinded trial of their cultivar, called Darling54, found blight damage was "orders of magnitude" smaller than in ordinary chestnuts.

Today Beijing has dropped to 589th globally in air pollution ranking despite being the world's fifth most populous city, and PM2.5 levels in the city fell 48 percent between 2010 and 2024, the steepest drop of any city studied. A big driver, according to a May study in Nature Health using satellite data and machine learning across 150 Chinese cities, is the country's shift to electric vehicles: more than half of all cars sold in China in 2025 were electric, and the researchers tie that shift to hundreds of thousands of prevented deaths.