Some people go to therapy. I opened a Twitter account instead 😂

A material made from cellulose can be engineered to withstand powerful impacts through a structure that reconstructs under stress. The bio-inspired design offers another way to make tough materials from plant-derived building blocks.

Some of nature’s energy-transfer reactions depend on electrons, protons and surrounding water molecules moving in coordination. Ultrafast X-rays captured key steps in this process, offering clues for designing better catalysts and energy technologies.

A protein best known for holding neighbouring cells together has another job: helping cells engulf nearby dead cells. Researchers observed this cleanup role in developing zebrafish and mouse embryos while the outer tissue barrier remained sealed.

A battery electrolyte can act like an early-warning sensor: when a lithium dendrite penetrates it, the material produces an electrical signal. This could help detect a dangerous battery failure before it fully develops.

The back of the eye may have a hidden drainage route that carries fluid and waste toward the body’s lymphatic system. The pathway was demonstrated in mice, challenging assumptions about how the eye clears waste.

The bacteria living in your gut were associated with about 15% of the variation in biological ageing rates in a study of 123 adults. The researchers stress that this link doesn’t prove gut microbes cause slower or faster ageing.

A jumping spider shows two distinct sleep stages, including one with rapid eye movements and muscle twitches resembling REM sleep. That doesn’t prove spiders dream, but it suggests their sleep is more complex than simple inactivity.

Light may one day write computer memory far faster than conventional magnetic switching. Researchers used a specially shaped ultrafast laser to reverse magnetic states in a material, demonstrating a potential route to switching over 1,000 times faster.

The most sensitive magnetic sensors can struggle to recognise a magnetic field of exactly zero. Engineers found a way around this by changing the layout of superconducting loops without making the loops different sizes.

More than one million forecasts from prediction platforms revealed that crowds can estimate probabilities surprisingly well—but their accuracy varies by subject. Even large groups of people are not equally reliable at predicting every kind of event.

Scientists may become less likely to publish disruptive research as their careers progress, but their most disruptive work is more likely to last. Across 11.2 million papers, the chance of lasting disruption rose from about 1% early on to 2.2% by year 40.

Carbon electrodes corrode faster when nearby water molecules lose their connected network. By reorganising that water layer, researchers reduced corrosion by about 51%—without changing the carbon itself.

Protein fibres often associated with brain diseases may have a useful role elsewhere: they can help carry RNA into sperm cells. In experiments, embryos produced at least 10 times more of a test protein when the RNA travelled this way.

A review of 500,000 scientific papers found references to studies that could not be located online. The share of affected papers rose from about 1 in 1,600 in 2023 to 1 in 435 in early 2026.

Artificial molecular motors built from DNA can move about 30 nanometres per second. Surprisingly, making them larger doesn’t necessarily make them faster: bigger steps are offset by longer pauses.