The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun terminating research grants that fund active scientific projects, citing a lack of alignment with “agency priorities.” The move has sparked widespread outrage among the scientific community, with many researchers expressing concerns that the terminations are motivated by politics rather than scientific merit. The NIH has instructed…
Earth on The Soothsayer
A groundbreaking study published in Nature has revealed that ancient humans used bone tools at least one million years earlier than previously thought. The discovery, made at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, dates back to around 1.5 million years ago and suggests that the human ancestor Homo erectus often used bones as tools. This finding challenges…
A temporary outage of the US-government-funded PubMed database of biomedical literature has left researchers globally in a panic. The disruption, which lasted for two days, highlights the reliance of scientists on the website and raises concerns about its future. PubMed is a freely accessible, comprehensive, and government-supported database that aggregates a vast amount of biomedical…
A company called Colossal Biosciences has announced a breakthrough in its efforts to de-extinct woolly mammoths and other animals. The company has successfully created gene-edited ‘woolly mice’ that harbor a mix of mutations modeled on those of woolly mammoths. While some specialists question the significance of this achievement, others see it as a crucial step…
A recent survey of hundreds of AI researchers has raised concerns about the feasibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence (AI) through the current approach and technology. The survey found that enlarging current AI systems is unlikely to lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), and that neural networks alone are insufficient to achieve AGI. Researchers are…
As the Trump administration’s repeated threats to research funding and mass firings of federal workers push scientists to take on unfamiliar roles as activists, a new wave of advocacy is emerging across the United States. Researchers are speaking at rallies, calling legislators, and forming new pressure groups to protect taxpayer-funded research and push back against…
A four-legged robot named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace, has successfully landed on the Moon, marking a significant milestone for commercial space exploration. This achievement is a result of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme, which aims to contract with aerospace companies to fly scientific instruments to the Moon. The Blue Ghost lander will…
Two US spacecraft, a commercial lander and NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, have launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral to search for water at the lunar south pole. The mission aims to provide crucial data on the presence and quantity of water, which could be used as a resource for future lunar exploration. The lander, named Athena, is…
The United States has withdrawn from a major United Nations climate assessment, blocking US officials’ participation and shutting down a team providing technical support. The move has sparked concerns about the impact on global climate policies and the loss of US contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Forecast for 6 months: The…
A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has shown no signs of spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic disorder, after being treated with a gene-targeting drug while in the womb. The child’s mother took the drug during late pregnancy, and the child continues to take it. This breakthrough treatment has the potential to change the lives of thousands of…