One of 8 fields we read

Technology & Innovation

74 discoveries published so far

August 11, 2026 The 14,000-year friendship that shows up in a brain scan Archaeologists have found dogs buried beside humans in graves as old as 14,000 years, and in a new book, archaeologist Peter Mitchell argues the earliest bond wasn't domestication in the usual sense: hunter-gatherers and wolves may have started out as something closer to equals.
August 10, 2026 A twisted piece of copper found a way to stop wasting carbon dioxide as hydrogen Turning captured CO2 into useful chemicals has one stubborn side effect: the reaction keeps making hydrogen gas instead of the carbon products people actually want.
August 9, 2026 The first mRNA flu shot just got approved, a year after officials tried to kill the technology On August 5, 2025, HHS canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth about $500 million.
August 6, 2026 A wireless chip that gives sight back to the blind spot PRIMA, a wireless retinal implant built by Science Corp., has received the European CE marking that clears it for sale across 30 countries, moving it from experimental device to something doctors can actually offer patients.
August 2, 2026 A photonic chip that fits four lanes of light into one structure Conventional topological photonic chips only carry light along their edges, wasting most of the material in between, like a road surrounded by wide, useless safety barriers.
August 1, 2026 A tiny retinal chip lets people with a common form of blindness read again Geographic atrophy, the advanced stage of dry age-related macular degeneration, destroys the light-sensing cells at the center of the retina and affects more than five million people worldwide, and until now there was no way to reverse the damage it causes.
July 31, 2026 A remote Cree community built its own fiber network, and it's already saved a life In February 2024, a young man in Fort Albany First Nation, on the shore of James Bay in northern Ontario, collapsed from hypothermia after failing to make it home.
July 30, 2026 A dying geothermal plant found new hot water and came roaring back Lightning Dock, a geothermal plant in New Mexico, was cooling fast when the startup Zanskar bought it in June 2024: water flowing into the turbines had dropped 50 degrees Fahrenheit over five years, five times the normal rate of decline, leaving it well short of the 310°F it needed to run.
July 28, 2026 A quantum computer just cut an hour-long network puzzle down to 15 seconds AT&T tested D-Wave's quantum annealing technology on a real network optimization task, the kind of problem that decides how to route technicians, manage traffic, and respond to outages across a sprawling fiber and 5G network, and watched a job that used to take about an hour finish in under 15 seconds.
July 27, 2026 Clean energy just got two strange new ways to store power for weeks, not hours On the site of a former coal plant in Trafford, near Manchester, Highview Power is building a facility that cools air down to -321°F, shrinking it to one seven-hundredth of its volume as a liquid, then lets it warm and expand back into gas to spin a turbine.
July 26, 2026 A bionic eye lets blind patients read novels again The Prima implant, made by Science Corporation, just cleared regulatory approval in the European Union, the first real commercial step for a device that gives central vision back to people with advanced macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in older adults.
July 26, 2026 An engineer who did homework by candlelight built Ghana a turbine that never goes dark Johannes Amo-Aye grew up in the Accra suburb of South Labadi doing homework by candlelight through regular power cuts, "waking up in the morning in my own sweat on the floor" during outages.
July 25, 2026 Pig kidneys were kept alive outside the body for days, then worked again A donor organ starts dying the moment it leaves the body, and even on ice at 39°F, surgeons usually have only hours to get it into a recipient.
July 25, 2026 AI is helping design better molecular scissors for gene editing CRISPR's protein scissors are precise, but not perfect: miss the target by the width of a hydrogen atom and the tool can cut the wrong gene, or nick DNA next to the one it was aimed at, called bystander editing.
July 24, 2026 The organ shortage is shrinking from two directions at once Right now, more than 104,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney, and 17 die every day before one arrives.
July 23, 2026 Orcas team up to smash sunfish into pieces, maybe for the fun of it In the Gulf of California, marine biologists have now documented orcas doing something nobody had described before: one orca holds a sharptail mola, or giant sunfish, in place while another swims off, builds up speed, and rams it hard enough to shatter the carcass into fragments.
July 21, 2026 Getting to orbit now costs a fraction of what it did, and it's still falling In 1960, launching a kilogram of anything into orbit cost more than $87,000 in today's dollars.
July 20, 2026 India's first fully commercial rocket reached orbit on its very first flight Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1, a 72-foot rocket capable of carrying payloads up to 770 pounds, lifted off from an island spaceport on Sriharikota, India, after a half-hour delay to fix a last-minute technical problem.
July 19, 2026 A dead hot dog factory is becoming a fusion reactor testbed A startup called Realta Fusion is converting a shuttered Oscar Mayer plant in Wisconsin into a facility called Forge, set to begin testing in 2029 whether a fusion reactor can actually turn a profit by producing more electricity than it consumes.
July 18, 2026 Wildfires are being fought from orbit, and also by donkeys who just eat the fuel first On July 7, the first three satellites in the Google-backed FireSat constellation launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9.
July 17, 2026 Heat pumps are outselling gas furnaces in America, even after the tax credit disappeared Heat pump sales in the US have doubled over the past 15 years, and in the first quarter of 2026 they outpaced natural-gas furnace sales by 32 percent.
July 15, 2026 Cancer researchers found a new way into solid tumors Two research teams working independently, one at McMaster University led by Sheila Singh, another testing an aggressive soft tissue cancer, both landed on the same cell-surface protein, GPNMB, as a workable CAR T target in solid tumors.
July 14, 2026 A koala named Bamse got a vaccine that could save her species An 18-month-old koala named Bamse, captured from a wild population near Burleigh, Queensland, became the first koala vaccinated with a new combination shot: one injection plus an implant, developed with Queensland University of Technology, that releases a second dose on its own over 30 days.
July 14, 2026 LAPD walked away from its license-plate camera contract The Los Angeles Police Department announced it will not renew its three-year contract with Flock Safety, the company behind AI-powered license plate cameras now blanketing much of the country.
July 13, 2026 China caught a rocket booster with a net, and stuck the landing On July 10th, China's Long March-10B lifted off from the Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Center, and about six minutes after launch, its first-stage booster was secured by a specially designed vessel using a net and cable recovery system waiting off the coast.
July 12, 2026 Doctors printed working kidney and liver tissue on the International Space Station California-based Auxilium Biotechnologies used its AMP-1 bioprinter aboard the ISS to produce tissue containing human kidney, liver, and cartilage cells, the first time kidney and liver tissue has been made off Earth.
July 11, 2026 CAR T cell therapy finally has a way into solid tumors CAR T cell therapy, which reprograms a patient's own immune cells to hunt cancer, has worked wonders against blood cancers but has struggled against solid tumors like brain, breast, and lung cancer, largely because those tumors do not share one consistent target.
July 10, 2026 A robot hand that can feel a LEGO brick as it clicks into place Norwegian robotics company 1X has built new hands for its NEO home robot with 25 degrees of freedom, 22 joints across the fingers and palm plus three at the wrist, all of them able to sense force, not just receive movement commands.
July 9, 2026 Humanoid robots completed their first surgeries
July 8, 2026 The AI-designed vaccine built for coronaviruses we haven't met yet Researchers at the University of Cambridge used artificial intelligence to scan genetic data from thousands of viruses in the sarbecovirus family, which includes SARS, COVID-19, and a range of bat coronaviruses that haven't yet jumped to humans.
July 7, 2026 Speaking More Languages Keeps Your Brain Biologically Younger Researchers built an AI brain-aging clock from MEG imaging data on 728 people spanning a wide age range, then applied it to 144 individuals from the Basque country of Spain who naturally speak between one and four languages.
July 7, 2026 GLP-1 Drugs Are Keeping Diabetics From Losing Their Limbs Cleveland Clinic researchers analyzed electronic health records from 2,133 people with both type 2 diabetes and peripheral artery disease, where narrowed arteries in the legs cut off blood flow severely enough to threaten the tissue itself, and compared them to a matched group taking metformin.
July 6, 2026 Solar panels over California irrigation canals are saving water too Project Nexus, a $20 million California state-funded pilot, installed solar canopies over two irrigation canals south of Modesto and tracked everything for a full irrigation season.
July 6, 2026 The largest ever mRNA vaccine review just confirmed the basics A team spanning Canada, Hong Kong, the UK, and the US spent years reviewing every stage of mRNA vaccine data: manufacturing, clinical trials, and real-world outcomes from billions of doses.
July 4, 2026 A Tiny Satellite Just Launched to Rescue a Falling Space Telescope The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory launched in 2004, built to study gamma-ray bursts, the brightest explosions in the universe.
July 4, 2026 The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins Its Ten-Year Movie of the Universe On June 30, 2026, the Vera C.
July 3, 2026 Psilocybin, a woman in her eighties, and a rare morning of full sentences A Japanese-American woman in her eighties had spent five years losing language to Alzheimer's, one syllable at a time.
July 3, 2026 The nose has a map, and we finally know how to read it For a long time, vision, touch and hearing had beautiful maps in the brain.
July 2, 2026 Life Built From Scratch A team at the University of Minnesota has built something that does not have a name yet, because nothing quite like it has existed before.
June 30, 2026 How We Search for Alien Life Just Got More Careful About the Ways We'd Miss It Two developments arrived today about the same problem from opposite ends.
June 29, 2026 Aging's cellular mechanism, and two ways to slow it Researchers at the Fritz Lipmann Institute in Germany identified what appears to be a previously unrecognized driver of cellular aging.
June 29, 2026 Restoring what injury takes away Researchers from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy and Cleveland Clinic implanted tiny permanent magnets into the residual forearm muscles of a 34-year-old man who had lost his forearm in a traumatic accident.
June 29, 2026 Feeding the world without wrecking what feeds it Three separate stories arrived this weekend at the intersection of food, land, and survival.
June 28, 2026 Why aging looks the way it does: three new clues Three separate pieces of the aging puzzle arrived from very different directions this week.
June 27, 2026 Epigenetic Editing Enters Human Trials for Muscular Dystrophy A company called Epicrispr Biotechnologies just shared the first clinical data from a human trial of epigenetic editing, a technique that does not alter the DNA sequence itself but changes the chemical tags attached to DNA, those tags that act like a mixing board controlling which genes are turned up or down.
June 27, 2026 A Bionic Hand That Lets the Brain Feel Again Two research teams working on completely different brain-machine interface systems, one from Sant'Anna in Pisa using micro-magnets implanted inside residual forearm muscles, and one from the Cleveland Clinic using surgical nerve-redirection, compared their data and found something unexpected: both systems produced identical perceptual maps in patients.
June 27, 2026 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Is Eight Months Ahead of Schedule NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrived at Kennedy Space Center on June 21, 2026, delivered by barge from Baltimore, eight months ahead of the 2027 launch schedule.
June 26, 2026 IBM's new chip extends Moore's Law another decade IBM built a chip that fits 100 billion transistors into the space of a human fingernail, roughly twice the density of today's best technology [9, 212].
June 26, 2026 Two remarkable findings about our ancient human relatives Two separate findings this week from ancient human relatives, and both contradicted what researchers thought they had figured out.
June 25, 2026 $500 million to end the common cold The payment company Stripe has launched a $500 million nonprofit called Intercept whose stated goal is to prevent the common cold and the flu, and eventually to eliminate respiratory viruses altogether.
June 22, 2026 Three clean energy milestones from three different directions A Chinese sodium-ion battery developed by manufacturer Hina matched Tesla battery quality benchmarks in independent testing, surprising the researchers who did the analysis.
June 21, 2026 Animals Evolved Languages to Work With Each Other Across Species A team led by Dr.
June 21, 2026 Ozempic Is Working for Most People, Just Not All of Them Two different angles on GLP-1 receptor agonists (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound) arrived the same week, and together they tell a clearer story than either does alone.
June 20, 2026 For the first time ever, the US made more electricity from sun than from coal In May 2026, solar supplied 12.8 percent of US electricity.
June 19, 2026 Japan shifted east when a seismic wave came back from Earth's core The 2011 Tohoku earthquake, magnitude 9.0, is among the most closely studied natural disasters ever recorded.
June 19, 2026 Gene therapy's landmark week: old cells made young, and a Huntington's cure moves closer Two gene therapy milestones arrived in the same week.
June 19, 2026 A brain implant let a man with ALS read to his daughter for three years Casey Harrell has ALS and can no longer speak without assistance.
June 19, 2026 AI predicted every World Cup match wrong. Humans did better. USA Today asked Microsoft's Copilot to predict four World Cup matches this week.
June 17, 2026 The Brain Implant That Finally Works at Home Casey Harrell is 47, has ALS, is mostly paralyzed, and his speech is difficult to understand.
June 16, 2026 Two Brain Implants Doing Things Once Thought Impossible Casey Harrell has ALS and is fully paralyzed.
June 16, 2026 COVID Vaccines Still Protect the Heart A team at Washington University in St.
June 16, 2026 UK Gives Its Children a Different Childhood The UK government announced Monday it will ban children under 16 from platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, with the ban expected to take effect next spring.
June 15, 2026 A single dose, months of relief from suicidal thoughts A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that one dose of psilocybin, paired with psychological support, rapidly reduced chronic suicidal thoughts in adults with severe depression, and the relief persisted for months.
June 15, 2026 Cancer's last walls are starting to come down Two separate pieces tell variations of the same story.
June 15, 2026 The first vaccine designed by AI just entered human trials Researchers at the University of Cambridge used a machine learning model to design a new vaccine from scratch, one that targets an entire family of human coronaviruses rather than any single strain.
June 14, 2026 Cancers That Defeated Every Drug for Forty Years Are Starting to Give Way In 1982, several research teams independently discovered that a single mutated DNA letter could turn a gene called RAS into a cancer driver.
June 13, 2026 The first vaccine designed by AI has been tested in humans Researchers at the University of Cambridge used a machine learning model to scan the genetic data of thousands of related coronaviruses and identify the regions of the virus that stay stable across mutations.
June 12, 2026 Joints that learn to grow young Stanford Medicine researchers identified a protein called 15-PGDH that accumulates in joints with age and gradually shuts down the cells responsible for making cartilage.
June 12, 2026 Your body is sending you a constant signal MIT Technology Review published a long piece on interoception, the body's internal sensory system: the signals your brain receives from your gut, heart rate, skin, and organs, about 11 million bits of information flowing in every second, with only 10 to 60 of them ever reaching conscious awareness.
June 11, 2026 The biology of aging is moving faster than we expected Three separate threads landed this week, each pulling at a different piece of aging biology.
June 11, 2026 The James Webb Space Telescope is rewriting three different chapters of astronomy simultaneously Three separate astronomical findings arrived the same week.
June 6, 2026 The Brain Can Learn to Actually Multitask, Through Neurological Migration Georgetown University researchers tracked participants through more than 30,000 image-sorting trials over five to ten weeks and watched what happened to their brains before and after they became experts at the task.
June 6, 2026 An AI-Designed Vaccine That Aims at Entire Virus Families Passes Its First Human Trial A University of Cambridge spinout called DIOSynVax tested a vaccine in 39 healthy human volunteers that was designed not to target a single coronavirus strain but to target features shared across the entire Sarbeco coronavirus family, which includes SARS-CoV-2, SARS, and multiple bat coronaviruses with pandemic potential.
June 6, 2026 The Pope Weighs In on AI and What Makes Human Work Human In the first encyclical of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV published "Magnifica humanitas," arguing that AI is not intrinsically immoral but that its adoption needs to slow to build moral guardrails, establish social safety nets for displaced workers, and create democratic processes to keep technology development under public rather than oligarchic control.